bytex64.net

As we all know, the primary purpose of high performance computers is the production of Blinkenlights, but creating a whole cluster of Folding@Home clients is a bit expensive. Last night I came up with a simple virtual computer whose entire purpose is to blink an array of lights: the BlinkenCPU. It operates on a simple machine language that runs in parallel on each cell, creating either a complex cellular automata, or a simple parallel computer, depending on how you like to look at it.

Originally, all it did was logical operators on its neighbors' values. This was enough to create Sierpinski triangle displays, and some chaotic sequences, but today, with some help from Erickson, I added enough functionality that it can properly simulate Conway's Game of Life. Of course, I'm not going to tell you how to do that, but I will tell you my version is 16 instructions long. }:->

(Automata Geek side note: It should be possible to do any variation of Life that only involves two values, like Conway's 23/3, but versions that involve three or more, like HighLife's 23/36, are in my understanding not possible. Then again, I didn't think that Life was possible without branching constructs, so I may be wrong. I'm not the expert, I only created the thing. :P)

I'm sure you've heard a lot about Google Chrome lately. I don't want to sound like a shill, but Chrome's superior debugging facilities made BlinkenCPU fall together pretty quickly. Even in beta form, it's light-years beyond other browsers for web development work.

So mess around with BlinkenCPU, and if you come up with something interesting, please share. I'd like to create a gallery of interesting code to load into the BlinkenCPU for others to enjoy.

Erickson IM'd me a link to a rant on OpenID. If you're not familiar with OpenID, the quick summary is that it's a distributed single-signon authentication system that uses a url as your identity. I control bytex64.net, so my OpenID is http://bytex64.net/. When you see someone using that URL as their identity, you know that that's me. Since Erickson isn't online for me to reply, I've decided instead to make Ted look silly here on my blog.

If you haven't read the above rant, I'll give you the condensed version: "I'm frustrated by OpenID, so I'm going to completely miss the point and trash it because I enjoy convincing other people that my opinion is right even though my arguments aren't well-reasoned or logical."

Ted is angry because OpenID "...violates too many preconceived notions of how authentication works." In my experience, it only violates one: Your username is now a url instead of a simple word. Once you enter that URL, you typically authenticate with a password just like any other system (but an OpenID server can authenticate you however it wants). Ted's system is to use the same username and password for every site. I can't dispute that this works, and that it's easy. The difference is that with his system, you have to log in to every website that asks. With OpenID, you only have to log into one. That's the point of single signon, after all, and the point that Ted is missing.

Mike visited on Sunday, and we had a good time attempting grilled pizza, wandering the campus, and generally getting drunk. We found that they're building a bell tower on the south quad. It's the McFarland Memorial Bell Tower, which will be 185 feet tall and house house 49 computer-controlled bells. I suppose that in tandem with renaming our internet presence to the questionable illinois.edu, those in charge of the University decided that we also needed more ridiculous phallic monuments.

Sunday was Mom's birthday, and us kids got together and got professional photographs taken. The studio gives you a "free" CD of the photos. Yes, the CD comes at no additional cost, but the purpose is misleading. The photos on the CD are encrypted so that only they can reprint them. While I understand the copyright issues involved, being mislead to believe that we were getting something when in fact all we are doing is storing their copyrighted photographs for them makes me a bit peeved.

Yes, I'm a day late on AIM Shutdown Week. I'm exhausted. 'night, everyone.

I was reading through my archive, and I realized that it's been over a year since the last AIM Shutdown Week. It's high time, then, to shut down again. You may point out that in the past I've said that "activists can't change anything," but there's an important distinction. This isn't activism. I'm not telling you what you should do. I'm showing you how it's done.

I could rant again about why you should use Jabber, but one of the great things about hypertext systems is that I don't have to repeat myself. Instead, I'd like to review what has changed in the last year.

• In January 2008, AOL began testing an XMPP server that allowed you to log into AIM with a standard Jabber client. The server was only a test server, and quickly became overloaded. As of this writing, it seems that the server is no longer functional.
• In March, AOL opened up access to their network with their OpenAIM 2.0 initiative. This means that AOL is no longer going to try to stymie third-party efforts to make clients work on their network. They even have a web API now to make your own integrated AIM web application. An interesting side-effect of this is that you can now log onto AIM through GMail Chat.
• Through my own testing, I have found that AIM now supports offline messages. According to a AIM 6 announcement, up to 40 messages in 24 hours can be stored on the server for later delivery when the recipient logs on.

But...

• AOL's test server didn't support federation, meaning that you still could not send messages to Jabber contacts from your XMPP AOL connection. All it allowed was the use of alternate clients.
• Even if the AIM network is open, it's still owned by AOL, and it's still crap. Jabber still maintains superior notification control and operates on a distributed network that no one party controls.
• Actually, I've got no complaints about offline messages. They're late to the party, but it works.

And so, it seems that AOL continues to cling to their own network, refusing to interoperate with their peers. Even Yahoo! and MSN Windows Live Messengers can talk to each other these days. When Microsoft is boasting better interoperability than you are, you're in serious trouble.

This year's AIM Shutdown Week is August 31 through September 6th. See you then... or maybe I won't. :)

My Mom's uncle gave me a very interesting book: Computer Lib, and it's hip flip side, Dream Machines, by Theodor H. Nelson. It is a treasure trove of pre-PC computing history that not only geeks out about the hardware and software, but explores the social changes that computers brought to our everyday lives, even back in 1974. Nelson is a hippie computer geek, and puts particular emphasis on the socially liberating aspects of computing, even going so far as to say that requiring higher math to learn computing at a University is "preposterous." Having strugled through such a program, I feel both qualified and compelled to disagree.

One particularly relevant section in relation to said education is an explanation of the University of Illinois' PLATO system. For those unacquainted, back in the 70's, PLATO was a multiuser interactive learning system that was the brainchild of Don Bitzer. The PLATO terminal was a custom-made smart terminal that communicated with a central mainframe (the Control Data 6600) via its own serial protocol. The terminal used a flat-panel plasma display (co-invented by Bitzer) and a computer-controlled microfiche system that was optionally available to PLATO lesson programmers. A generic I/O system allowed peripherals to be connected to the PLATO system for specific applications like music or instrumentation. Optionally, the terminal could use a touch screen interface or a pre-recorded audio disc for sounds. All of the mechanicals of these peripherals were powered by compressed air.

PLATO's lessons (as the programs were called) were programmed in a language invented by Paul Tenczar called TUTOR. TUTOR was designed to make question-and-answer routines simple, and used forward and back buttons on the keyboard for navigation through a lesson. But even though the system was designed for learning, many games, even multiplayer ones, were created for the system. The book states that there was spacewar, dogfight (which sounds like a predecessor to Atari's Combat), moonwar (which sounds like the ancestor of Scorched Earth), and nova, a "simulated navigation among millions of different stars and solar systems, all of which may be revisited, all of which are different."

The best description of PLATO, I think, is this paragraph from the book.

Indeed, this extended Republic of PLATO-- the systems people in Urbana, the authors and locals-in-charge throughout the network-- constitute one of the maddest rookeries of computer freaks in the world. Where else would you find a 14-year-old systems programmer who's had his job for two years? Where else would you see people fall in love over the Talkamatic (a PLATO program which allows you to have written conversations with people at other terminals, wherever they may be) only to clash when they at last they meet in person? Where else can you play so many different games with faraway strangers? Where else can students anywhere in the network sign into hundreds of different lessons in different subjects (most of them incomplete)? Where else are people working on various different programs for elementary statistics, all to be offered on the same system?

When put like that, it all sounds rather familiar, doesn't it? :)

My sister's boyfriend (and good friend of mine) Alex has given me an account on his G4 PowerMac, so I'm attempting to do things "the Apple way."

Yeah, that lasted about 35 seconds.

First off, I wanted to change my desktop background to black. A simple idea. Takes fifteen seconds in Windows, and about the same under X, depending on your environment and your typing speed (I like xsetroot -solid black). OS X is easy, right, so this should take ten seconds, tops. Here's what happened:

1. Right click on the desktop, choose "Change Desktop Background..."
2. Choose "Solid Colors" from the list
3. Choose... wait, there's no black. There's eleven varying shades of blue and gray, and white, but no black. What the hell?
4. Start up Opera, google for "OS X desktop color"
5. Read an article that explains that the solid colors are actually PNG files, and that you'll have to copy one and edit it to get the color you'd like
6. Find /Library/Desktop Pictures/Solid Colors
7. Copy "Solid White.png" to "Solid Black.png"
8. Ask Alex if he has any image editing applications installed
9. Edit "Solid Black.png" in Seashore to make it black
10. Choose "Solid Black" in the Control Panel applet

Wow, that was easy!

Next I googled to see if anyone had brought focus-follows-mouse to OS X yet. The answer is close, but no cigar, with the longer answer being "No, because the entire window system isn't architected to support it, and so you probably won't see it for five to seven years, at least." And yes, I know it has Expose, and I know it has Spaces. Neither of those is even close to proper focus follows mouse behavior and you know it.

And things like SteerMouse, a $20 application that allows you to configure fucking mouse acceleration, just spreads the ass-backwards icing on the cultural shitcake that is Apple. Don't tell me that it's better this way. Don't give me bullshit apologetic explanations for the blatantly missing features. When your customers have to go elsewhere, and even pay money for basic functionality that has existed elsewhere for decades, your product has failed.

Apple, call me when you have your shit together.

I've been watching a lot of Lois and Clark lately. It's a wonderful show, so full of clichés and camp. It's camptastic. Perhaps even camptacular. Occasionally it's a camptastrophe, but for the most part it's an excellent campfest. I likes it.

I've also been watching an anime called RD Sennou Chosashitsu, done by Shirow Masamune, who is probably best known for Ghost in the Shell. It takes place in the future, when humans have cyberbrains and interact through virtual reality networks called "Metals." What I like about it is not the future sci-fi aspect, but rather how it explores the difference this makes in what it means to be human. One episode in particular explores the impact of the full digitization of books and how that changes the relationship between the reader and the author. It's well done; I recommend it.

Last week my car got vandalized. One tire was slashed, and it got a good ketchup and mustard bath. The good news is that the slashed tire was in bad shape anyway, and was due to be replaced. The better news is that I found a place locally that sells the Yokohama AVID T4 in my size. :-D You may recall that I got a couple of AVID H4S for my RX-7, and I was entirely pleased with them. Hopefully the more tame T4 will live up to those expectations. (The H4S is not available on 13" rims, unfortunately) I'm getting those installed tomorrow. I've found that even the T4s aren't common in 13", so hopefully they got the right size, or at least the wrong size that will still fit. :)

[Sidebar: The size used on the '88 Civic was the 175/70R13. That first number is the tread width, in mm. The second is an "aspect ratio" that specifies how tall the sidewall is compared to the tread width. In this example, it would be 70% of 175mm, or 122.5mm. The third number is the rim size, in inches. How we wound up with a metric that mixes SI and Imperial units, I don't know, but that's how it is. What this means is that a slightly larger tire, like a 185/70R13, will still fit on my rims, but will be 2.4% larger in radius, and thus 4.9% larger in circumference. I have calculated that my speedometer is roughly 5% fast, so if I wind up with this kind of mistake, it will cancel out the speedometer mistake nicely. On the other hand, if I was misunderstood to want a 175/70R14, it wouldn't work at all, because I'd need 14" rims.]

"Y'know," Erickson says to me, "If found yourself with a family..."

"Heaven forbid," I interjected.

"... you could get a nice Audi RS6 Avant. Over 500 horsepower, and it's a wagon, so you've got room for the kids."

"Heh, no, I'll get something more practical. 'Honey, I got us the perfect car, a used Honda NSX! It's got room for me, and you, and small pieces of luggage like our newborn baby!'"

Erickson laughs. I ponder further.

"I don't have the creativity to imagine what kind of scowl that would invoke."

I left a pound of sliced turkey pastrami in the car after shopping today. It was sitting next to a cold tub of margarine, but it was also in there for a good ten hours. My hope is that pastrami is so dry and salty that it will not have grown much microbial badness. I ate a slice as a test. I figure if I can keep it down, it's still good. I'm keeping it down right now, but it definitely feels like my stomach is unhappy with the deal.

I shopped at Aldi today, which was... interesting. Their website claims that shoppers are pleased with the familiarness of "their" store, which is a nice way of saying that everything is placed helter-skelter and no two stores are the same. It's sort of like the Slackware of grocery stores: They save money and time by doing away with the conveniences other stores provide. And as a user of the official distro of the Church of the SubGenius, I can get behind that.

OKCupid has become progressively more insistent on matching. It now has, in addition to traditional question-based matching, a Hot or Not style "quickmatch," and a three-shot suggestion box called a "quiver." Regardless, trolling through matches is still an exercise in frustration. "Eggplant parmesan... good... plays IIDX... wow... favorite author is Ayn Rand. Dammit." You would not believe how often Ayn Rand comes up with otherwise interesting women.

In my pile of books I unpacked, I found my copy of Diana Hacker's A Writer's Reference. It's taken up a semi-permanent place on my desk, and I've found it most useful so far in refreshing punctuation rules. For example, when using a colon to separate two independent clauses, the second clause may begin with a lower case or a capital letter. In this way, it can work like either a semicolon, where the second clause begins with lower case, or a period, where the next clause is a sentence and thus starts with upper case. What I really like about the book is that it is not a prescriptivist tome of rules to be followed to the letter. Hacker, rather, has created a manual for writing effectively, carefully noting when and where rules may be broken for stylistic emphasis.

And with that, it's time for bed.

I'm writing to you from Erickson and my new home, a place we've dubbed AwesomeBase Alpha. We've got our stuff moved in and mostly unpacked, but we're discovering that moving in, especially with as much accumulated junk as we have, exhibits a nasty 90/10 long tail. We still don't even have our network fully configured, and we've had internet working for four days. :/

Overall, though, the move has been smooth, even if it is exhausting. Between my mom and Erickson's mom, we've been gifted enough food to keep us for a while, and Erickson's hungry hungry Audi has proved spacious enough to carry large volumes of stuff without needing the Astro (which we did press into use for the really big stuff).

Last night I decided I needed a bedside computer, so I hauled out the old 133MHz Pentium Thinkpad (the one of robot legend), and configured it to do nothing but a fullscreen VNC to Yomiko. It's effectively the portability (and old-age crotchetiness) of a Thinkpad with the power of a dual processor Opteron. Not a bad hack, if I do say so myself. I'm using it right now to type this post.

With most of our stuff situated, I helped my sister Danielle move some stuff from her old apartment to her new place in a house in Urbana. It's a decent place, and she has some great roommates. We ate dinner at Cracker Barrel, and determined experimentally that in Illinois, the expiration of gift cards is prohibited by law.

So here's the score: I'm not going to school, I'm not working for the University, I'm not living on campus, and I've lived in the area most of my life. I'm officially a townie. And unrelatedly, since it's been far too long since I've done a list, here are some random statistics:

• Yomiko uptime before move: 291 days (Booyah Debian stable + UPS)
• Number of failed hard drives in Zaphod's RAID 5: 1
• Estimated decibel level of Mr. Roboto played on Erickson's stereo system: 90
• Advertised download speed for AT&T Elite DSL: 6Mbit/s
• Actual download speed for AT&T Elite DSL: 5.1Mbit/s
• Advertised download speed for Comcast Cable Internet: 10Mbit/s (burstable to 12Mbit/s)
• Satisfaction with not giving Comcast a red cent: immeasurable
• Cost to fill the tank in the Astro at $3.67/gal: $91.75
• Erickson's current average gas mileage: 19.0 MPG
• Last time I filled up my car: June 30th
• Amount we paid for our leather sofa, microfiber chair, glass dining table w/chairs, wicker end tables, tv stand, coffee table, office chair, bookshelves, and three floor lamps: $0

Aaaaah, it's good to be back. :)

I just got done re-watching Titan AE. I was mildly impressed with it when I watched it the first time, partly for its handling of adult themes, and partly for its pioneering work in combining hand-drawn animation and CG. They billed it as a kid's movie, of course, but I don't think that's fair. How many necks were snapped in the last kid's movie you saw? (If you're like me, that last movie was Wall-E, and the answer is zero) When re-watching it, I realized the real reason I like the movie: Akima, voiced by none other than Drew Barrymore.

Ah, Drew... *swoon*

Since none of you have posted a reply lately, you probably haven't seen my new, improved, and even spiffier editing widget. The editing page now fills the full width of your browser instead of being crammed into my single column design. The live preview now scrolls in its own div, meaning that the edit area is never out of sight. But most amazingly, I added a little javascript magic so that the edit area and preview scroll in synchrony! I'm really happy with it. :)

And in the process of setting up a way to switch between full width and column modes, I re-did how the column layout works, and suddenly the column worked in IE. After tweaking a few formerly implicit values on the header, about 95% of the site now works in IE7. That's a whole lot better than IE6, which couldn't have rendered it worse if it threw all my HTML tags in a bag and pulled them out at random. Supposedly IE8 will get everything right (but I'll believe it when I see it).

And for those of you who like to spend Saturday night learning new and exciting algorithms for spatial indexing (and I know I do), please check out this site chock-full of Spatial Index Demos. It's got multitudes QuadTrees and K-d trees for storing and quickly finding points, rectangles, lines, and regions, all demonstrated in a powerful Java applet that allows you to step through and see the logic of the algorithm involved. It pleases me in that special part of my brain that was permanently scarred by discrete math during my CS education.

Speaking of brain damage... POSITION TO DESTROY!