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What's Up With Me, and User Interface Opinon Questions [06 Nov 2009|04:58pm] Uh, did somebody just buy me a gift subscription to Science News? A copy of the current issue just arrived in today's mail ... and I did recently mentioned (and a little less recently) mention having been a reader of it in the past. If so, thank you. A lot. I've missed it. It's a bit thicker now than I remember. I could probably get all the same news from the web nowadays, but someties it's just easier -- feels more relaxed and recreational -- to read stuff like that on paper. And by just turning pages instead of scrolling up and down and then deciding which links to click next. (I love the web, but I'm glad we still have dead-trees publications as well.) I've got a few questions regarding folks' preferences in command-line options for commands. The copy of this entry with the poll in it is at Dreamwidth (or you can jump (I think) directly to just the poll itself) I'm not sure whether I'll get back to the project that sparked the questions in that poll (see below), but the responses will pertain to some future project too, I'm sure. Despite the welcome arrival of a copy of Science News, it's been a discouraging week. The Mac won't boot, and it died just as I was fine-tuning the interface for a program that was nearly ready to share, beautifully comment, with a man-page and everything ... that I had not yet copied elsewhere to try compiling on a different OS, or to post yet. There was a lot else not backed up, but most of that will merely annoy and inconvenience me; this bit is the "somebody kicked over my masterpiece sand castle just before I finished it" kick in the gut. (Hmm. Much of what was backed up was backed up to DVD. I'm not sure yet whether any of my other computers can handle that. Experiments to put on my to-do list.) Couple that with the main Linux workstation -- the bedroom machine -- which I hadn't been using much since I was given the Mac, no longer talking to its monitor, and I've been getting by with an itty-bitty Windows XP machine with a tiny screen and a so-so X server on it for the past few days, and it's been really putting a dent in my enthusiasm. So, in the immortal word of Charlie Brown: AAAUUUUUUGH! (The bedroom Linux machine shows the POST messages on the monitor -- which is itself having major problems, but I have an even larger monitor to use ifwhen I ever feel capable of getting it up the stairs -- but at some point the screen goes blank and nothing I do to the keyboard or mouse will light it up again. I can SSH to it, and throw X apps to the itty bitty XP screen (a VAIO that only works when plugged into the wall), but I don't get the benefit of the decent-sized screen or the larger keyboard.) The small screen is fine for web surfing and email; not so good for editing source in one window, editing docs in another, looking stuff up in a third, and viewing output in a fourth, or comparing two PS/PDF pages side by side. Or maybe I'm just spoiled from having a Mac to use for the past several months. I haven't had the heart to start reconstructing a week of coding from scratch (get a filter working: a couple hours; add enough comments that I won't be embarrassed if anybody else sees it, usefully robust command-line arguments and options, and somewhat reasonable user documentation: a week) -- and I'm still clinging to the faint hope that the files can be recovered -- so I tried to dive back into composing and arranging, and am finding the tiny screen even more annoying for that than for programming. Or maybe I'm just too acutely frustrated and discouraged to cope with even small inconveniences right now. Maybe I'll feel differently about this in a month. But right now, it sucks. The plan is to head down to Virginia to see whether justgus37, who has more Mac tools, more Mac experience, and OS install media, has any more success ressurecting the Mac than I've had. Wednesday I wasn't feeling well enough to drive that far; last night I got a late start and then ran into some kind of mess that turned I95 and the Beltway into obstacles instead of arteries, and turned back after it became clear I wouldn't get there at any sane hour. So: trying again tonight, if I'm up to it, which at the moment is iffy but I've still got little under and hour to decide. (By the time I got home again last night, it hurt to steer, and I've got power steering. But on the plus side, I got more sleep this morning than the past couple of days, so let's see what my body decides to do with that.) I want my code back. I want my files back. I want my tools back. This business of knowing I need more backup media and a big disk for a live backup, but not being able to afford either ... well it's starting to wear me down. post comment

QotD [06 Nov 2009|05:25am] Mark Danner:   I call this in the book the Athenian problem. Which is how do you have--   Bill Moyers:   Athenian meaning Athens of Greece, right?   Mark Danner:   Exactly. How do you have a democratic empire, how do you have an imperial foreign policy built on a democracy polity. It's like some sort of strange mythical beast that's part lion, part dragon. You know at the bottom is a democracy, and then it's an imperial power around the world. And the problem is that the things demanded by an empire, which is staying power, ruthlessness, the ability and the willingness to use its power around the world, it's something that democracies tend to be quite skeptical about. And this is a political factor that looms obviously very large in [Obama's] calculations. -- from the PBS television program, Bill Moyers Journal, 2009-10-16 post comment

QotD [05 Nov 2009|12:40pm] "I do not like this word 'bomb'. It is not a bomb; it is a device which is exploding." -- French ambassador Jacques Le Blanc (sometime in 1995?) [My ISP where the QotD script runs was installing a new file server last night/this morning ... I'm guessing that has something to do with the script not being executed this morning, since its scheduled run was in the middle of the maintenance window.] post comment

Dream Fragment [05 Nov 2009|12:33pm] ( a short conversation ) post comment

QotD [04 Nov 2009|05:25am] "I'm waiting for a simple straightforward 'The Only Solution To The Swine Flu Crisis Is To Give Me A Big Pile Of Money' article. I honestly don't know whether to expect it to appear in The Onion or a 'normal' news outlet." -- stevemb, 2009-10-30 post comment

QotD [03 Nov 2009|05:25am] "justice is not about the law. though the law should be about justice." -- stoneself, 2009-10-16 post comment

QotD [02 Nov 2009|05:25am] Bill Moyers:   Is torture the purest expression of evil that you've seen?   Mark Danner:   I think if you're looking for a pure expression of evil, torture is pretty-- is a pretty good candidate.   Bill Moyers:   Why?   Mark Danner:   Well, because you are taking-- I mean, it's also the most illiberal policy, the sort of most diametrically opposed to what we are as a polity. A liberal state has as its heart the notion that government is limited. That there is an area of privacy of our daily lives in which governmental power, state power, cannot intervene. And torture takes over someone's nervous system. Torture takes over what they feel. Torture takes over and penetrates into their mind and into their body. It's not only illegal, it's immoral. And it's against-- it's against the heart of what the American political tradition stands for, which is an enlightenment tradition. And in which the abolition of torture, by the way, in the 18th and 17th century, was extremely important. So it's going back into darkness, I think, in a very dramatic way.   -- from the PBS television program, Bill Moyers Journal, 2009-10-16 post comment

QotD [01 Nov 2009|05:25am] "Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?" -- John Dos Passos, 1917 [I don't suppose calendars with intercalary months count, but does getting an extra hour at the start of Samhain due to the end of Daylight Spending Time count as a (very short) gap? Happy New Year, folks, and don't forget to check your clocks (and VCRs and PDAs and ...) if you live in a place that ends DST on the US schedule.] post comment

I may be overcommenting [31 Oct 2009|12:40pm] Is this over-commenting / a sign that I didn't sleep well enough last night? I just wrote, in a C program: int i; /* Ye olde generick loope counter (you */ /* do know that the 'Y' in "ye olde" is */ /* really supposed to be a _thorn_, so */ /* it's still pronounced "the old" not */ /* "yee old" right? Well you do now. */ /* Not sure what most C compilers would */ /* do with a non-ASCII character in a */ /* comment though. But I digress ...) */ I do seem to comment more extensively after trying to read almost anybody else's code, where I'm lucky to find comments describing a function's purpose, much less any explanation of its arguments or useful clues as to where I need to poke at it to add a feature. And I've been reading other people's code lately. Obviously, this is code I'm planning to send to a bunch of other people ... (But while I'm posting -- do other compilers supply the __FILE__ and __DATE__ pre-defined macros, or is that just a gcc thing? I don't know what Windows users will compile this with.) post comment

QotD [31 Oct 2009|05:25am] From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-11-01: "Ye had need tak care how ye dispute the existence of fairies, brownies and apparitions there; ye may as weel dispute the Gospel o' Sant Matthew." -- James Hogg, in 'The Wool Gatherer'. http://www.archive.org/stream/talesandsketches01hoggrich] (submitted to the mailing list by Jean Rogers) [The line is spoken by a character named Barnaby.] Happy Hallow'een and a blessed Samhain Eve, all! post comment

QotD [30 Oct 2009|05:25am] "We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future." -- Randall Munroe, xkcd, 2009-10-21 (image title attribute on that day's strip -- hover over the image (or use "view source") to see it), comparing Terminator to today post comment

QotD [29 Oct 2009|05:25am] From the PBS television program, Charlie Rose (formerly The Charlie Rose Show according to IMDB), 2009-05-11 (video and transcript): </td></tr> Elizabeth Warren:   We destabilized an entire American system and worldwide economic system one family at a time. We started it right down at the basic level. So when we're going to talk about regulatory reform -- in the 1930s, we started it by making it safe to put money in banks. We need to start regulatory reform in 2009 right down at the family level, to just get a market for credit that works for families. You don't have to pretend ...  </p> Charlie Rose:   But I love the objective. How do we do that?  </p> Elizabeth Warren:   We know how to do this. How did we make water safe? How did we make the paper not have arsenic in it? And your suit have, you know, be properly labeled for what it had? This is what government actually does. It supports markets by creating agencies that say, hey, you just have to be -- you have to disclose, right, you've got to have some minimum safety standards. We've done this over and over. We've done it with food labeling. We've made sure that little babies' carseats don't collapse on impact, that we don't have lead in children's toys. We ultimately have a baseline safety for every product you taste, touch, smell, feel, but we don't have it for credit products.  </p> Charlie Rose:   OK. If you were going to put together a committee to recommend to the president of the United States, chairman of the Fed, what the regulations for the future which will shape the next 50 years are going to be, who should do this? It ought to be in the full light of air.  </p> Elizabeth Warren:   Right. So I would say, let's ask Congress to give us a new agency. Right? We're going to have one more thing in government. We've taken care of the safety, we've taken care of our environment, we've taken care of food and drugs, we've taken care of basic consumer products that you buy and sell, meat, agricultural products. Let's do one for credit products, basic safety so that the markets can work. Ultimately, I'm real free-market girl. I mean, I truly believe markets bring us enormous riches. They let us do lots of things, including they let us be stupid. And... [...] And we should hold people responsible for being stupid. What we shouldn't do are have markets that are designed around tricking people. We have to come back to the notion that government really has a function in America. It has the function of creating kind of these basic safety -- think about how the world -- how well markets have worked. [...] post comment

QotD [28 Oct 2009|05:25am] "One way to introduce a course like this would be to promise you that by reading these books and by debating these issues you will become a better more responsible citizen. You will examine the presuppositions of public policy, you will hone your political judgment, you will become a more effective participant in public affairs. This would be a partial and misleading promise. "Political philosophy for the most part hasn't worked that way. You have to allow for the possibility that political philosophy may make you a worse citizen rather than a better one. Or at least a worse citizen before it makes you a better one. And that's because philosophy is a distancing (even debilitating) activity. "And you see this going back to Socrates [...] "[...] philosophy distances us from conventions, from established assumptions, and from settled beliefs. And those are the risks, personal and political. [...] "... the very fact [these questions] have recurred and persisted may suggest that though they are impossible in one sense, they're unavoidable in another. And the reason they're unavoidable, the reason they're inescapable, is that we live some answer to these questions every day... just throwing up your hands and giving up on moral reflection is no solution." -- professor Michael Sandel [copied from longer passage quoted at The Obligate Scientist; also in a clip shown on the PBS television program Charlie Rose, 2009-10-12] post comment

QotD [27 Oct 2009|05:25am] From Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler ( howardtayler), 2009-09-13: Reverend Lieutenant Theo Fobius:   Do you want my discourse on the relative merits of moral absolutism and moral relativism, or --   Commander Kevyn Andreyasn:   Evil or not. That's what I want.   Reverend Lieutenant Theo Fobius:   Do you have a measuring stick with "evil" clearly labelled on it? I have several, but they're all of different lengths. And some measure along axes perpendicular to observable reality. post comment

QotD [26 Oct 2009|05:25am] "To today's Republican, attempting to understand what one's opponent is saying is a sign of weakness. a TRUE Klingon tries to prevent his opponent from saying it in the first place." -- admnaismith, 2009-09-10 post comment

QotD [25 Oct 2009|05:25am] From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-02-04: "Sleeping, I dream about my cyborg half, that it's a monster that has half-devoured me, its teeth sunk in the right half of my body. Or it's a forest I've wandered into, and I'm lost amid its mazy pathways, deep pools, strange trees whose long fronds brush my shoulders. In the center, there's an enchanted well I can never quite reach. Night falls and the sky shows strange new constellations. Waking at night, the world glows in wireframe. "Tonight, I have a whole long dream about a list of assembler instructions and their possible uses and then about the team that wrote them, a bunch of engineers in the 1980s. It turns out to be obsolete documentation that got left on an install disc for a chip series three generations before mine, made by a Protheon-owned company out in New Mexico. Just before waking, I catch a glimpse of red earth and a storefront office window in an Albuquerque strip mall, the smell of air conditioning and bad office coffee, the glass door swinging shut, as if whoever made me has only just left the building." -- Austin Grossman, from his novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible. The novel tells the story of Fatale, a cyborg who joins a group of superheroes known as the Champions. (submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach) post comment

QotD [24 Oct 2009|05:25am] "In the middle of the concert I require to, as Wayne Shorter would say, take a backwards flip into the unknown. I need 20 minutes to half an hour where nobody knows, including myself, what we're going to do. Not the light man or the sound man. So you can dip into what's not written, beyond the mechanics, the intangibles." -- Carlos Santana (b. 1947-07-20), interviewed by Tavis Smiley on the PBS television program Tavis Smiley, 2009-04-02 post comment

QotD [23 Oct 2009|05:25am] "privilege isn't about [who] has it the worst. it is about who has some aspect of expectation and who doesn't." -- dyssonance, 2009-09-06 post comment

To See The World In A Gr^H^H Single Pixel [23 Oct 2009|02:48am] From last night's L&O:SVU[*]: That's it? No porn? You're sure? Just three cheesy pictures, totally innoccuous. That doesn't make sense. Why would O'Donnell give Banks these pictures? I didn't get it either, so I dug a little deeper, and found computer code hidden in a pixel. [zooms in one a tiny portion of the image, so each pixel appears as a square, then teensy text appears, line by line, within one square] I cracked it, I found a secret file, and found all these pictures. Ripped me right out of the story, it did. Took my head away from the plot, and I spent the last 18 minutes of the episode stuck in can't-decide-whether-to-mock-or-gripe mode. Some writer -- no, make that every writer, the director, whover did the graphics for that scene, and anybody else who had a chance to look at that line -- apparently has heard of steganography but lacks not only any trace of a clue about how it works, but also a reasonable understanding of how raster image files work in general. I'm pretty sure that if the cheesy picture had been stored with a colour depth of 640 bits per pixel[**] (instead of a more typical 24 bits), the police tech would have immediately noticed that a) the file was suspiciously large for that size picture, and b) ordinary image-handling software was confused by it. Is it just a super-geek thing, or were reasonably computer-literate non-geeks scratching their heads and thinking, "Wait, pixels don't work like that, right?" C'mon, there has to be at least one graphic artist working on that show who knows what a pixel is, whom they could've asked ... Then again, in a genre (police procedurals / crime drama) where until recently it seemed that low-budget CCTV cameras all had infinite resolution as long as a detective kept asking a tech to zoom in a little farther[***], I guess the idea that any one pixel could hold arbitrary amounts of "computer code" is just more of the same kind of error... Steganographic images are real, of course. Steganography[****] is not just used for sexy spy stuff and sleazy sex-crimes stuff like on the telly; it's also the technique underlying invisible digital watermarks (the kind where you don't see a distracting logo layered on the image, but where the person who stuck the watermark in can prove that you stole her photo even after you've cropped off the copyright notice and such). It doesn't hide a lot of info in one pixel. In a 24-bits-per-pixel image, human viewers are usually not going to notice tiny changes to low-order bits of the pixels, so you spread the hidden data out across several pixels, making the change to each pixel too small to attract attention. Now if they'd just gotten that bit even almost right, they wouldn't have wrecked the last third of the episode for computer-literate people. There'd still be the problem of, say, a 4 GB flash drive large enough for thousands of photos and PDF files appearing to contain only three small images and almost no free space left, without that being a tip-off right there (or the writers could've made that the inspiration for the tech to check for hidden files and/or steganography!), but that's more of a 'fridge logic' problem than a point-and-laugh error.   Or am I asking too much? [*] Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, "Hardwired" [**] Rough idea based on how many dots representing the revealed computer code appeared in that one-pixel square, without bothering to rewind and watch more closely. [***] Lately it seems the more common approach is to have the tech say, "I'll clean that up for you," and apply some math to the image to interpolate the desired data -- often a few steps better than what I suspect works in real life, but still blurry enough to not smack the casual viewer upside the head with the absurdity of it -- with the occasional infinite-resolution camera and a few cases of techs saying, "Well you know real cameras don't work like the ones on tee vee; this is as good as it gets," once in a while. [****] Note also that steganography is not limited to images. Codes of the "take the first letter of every seventh word" count as steganography too. But on television, when steganography shows up it's usually in a photo or video. post comment

QotD [22 Oct 2009|05:25am] "[...] There can be no redemption - not after corpses floated in the streets, not after the dying begged for help and none came. We talk about the message discipline of the noise machine, but we - by which I mean anyone and everyone else - can do it too. "Thug: ....healthcare is socialism scaaaaaaary - You: Dude, Hurricane Katrina. Thug: ...national security bugaboo - You: Sorry, Hurricane Katrina. Thug: ...gift certificate Black president - You: Wanker, you lost me at Hurricane Katrina. Thug: ...forgetting 9/11 - You: You forgot Hurricane Katrina. So forget you." -- Tata, Poor Impulse Control, 2009-08-28 [thanks to realinterrobang for quoting it earlier] post comment

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