bytex64.net blog

VFS 2009.1 is here!

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:47:45 -0600

For those of you who aren't cool enough to have subscribed to the RSS feeds for VFS (but are apparently still cool enough to read my blog), VFS 2009.1 has been released.

Reception thus far has been good — especially the College of Awesome commercial, which may finally garner us that coveted one star rating. Erickson wants to do a musical bit, and Alex has been inspired to write a script for a green-screen sci-fi show he bills as "the best American sci-fi show of 1980." According to my research, he only has to beat Galactica 1980 and Beyond Westworld, so in all likelihood, he will succeed.

Hopefully this means there will be more interest and momentum for VFS going forward, but I'm not counting on it. That's my new years' resolution for VFS: Stop worrying about deadlines and just get stuff done. Not that I really did, but now it's official. There will be no schedule. :)

So watch, enjoy, etc. I hope you like it as much as we do. :)

THIS JUST IN

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 02:39:40 -0600

Would you like to see the most retarded thing currently on the Internet?

Believe it or not, I found that on oreilly.com. Just thought you'd like to know.

Get Coked Up

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 04:34:03 -0600

I'm not a big fan of Coca-Cola as a beverage. It's always been a bit harsh for my tastes. As a solvent, however, it's quite a handy substance. I'm sure you've all heard of the experiment where you put a tooth in a jar of Coke and it completely dissolves the tooth. I'm sure some of you think that's an urban legend. It's not.

It's no secret that sodas are acidic. Most of the time you'll find some citric acid, and the carbonation will produce a small amount of carbonic acid. Coke, unlike most other sodas however, contains phosphoric acid.

Phosphoric acid is a bit tougher animal than the others. To illustrate somewhat abstractly, I've pulled from a list of common acids and bases at 0.1 molarity (molarity isn't important to this comparison, but it means that in all cases we are measuring the same concentration). Carbonic acid is relatively weak at 3.8 pH. Citric acid is 2.1. Phosphoric acid is 1.5. Now, of course, you're not drinking 0.1 molar phosphoric acid in a can of Coke — that would burn your throat — but you are drinking something a fair bit stronger than a Sprite or even a Barqs. Other internet sources put the pH of Coke somewhere around 2.5.

So what you've got is a nice mild acid that powers through surface gunk on about anything. I've been using it to clean charred metal bits from my dryer. They were so gray and dingy that I thought they were steel. After a few hours soak in a Coke, I rubbed them clean to find that they were actually copper. That is serious cleaning power there.

So if you're going to drink Coke, for god's sake, brush your teeth afterwards. :)

Happy Boxing Day!

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 03:56:57 -0600

Oh, and yes, Happy Christmas!

My Christmas went well. We were lacking Andrea as she was off with Alex at his family's this year. We had a rather different tree, a tropical bush-like evergreen that sat upon a chair and was decorated with a string of lights and many tiny shiny balls. After opening presents, we ate MREs. Andrea and Alex joined us later in the day for dinner. The obligatory swag list:

Erickson got me The American Language, Fourth Edition, by H.L. Mencken. It's a wonderfully weighty tome detailing the divergence and evolution of American English from the English of Great Britain. So far, it's been a brilliant and entertaining read.
Erickson's parents got me John Hodgman's two books, THE AREAS OF MY EXPERTISE, and its continuation, MORE INFORMATION THAN YOU REQUIRE. They are packed with more entertainingly plausible lies than a man should be able to create in his entire lifetime.
Some clothing and food, notably some real bacon bits.
From Danielle, a set of bacon-scented candles. Unfortunately, when lit, they smell a lot more like soy than bacon. I suspect that they were made by a vegetarian. Luckily for Danielle, it is the thought that counts, and I love them. :)
From Andrea, a bar of Dove chocolate, a candy cane, a lexically well-mangled card, and a mystery gift still traveling through the mail.
From Tim, a new stocking cap that replaces the one I lost not days after buying it.
From Mom and Dad:
- A spare (1200mAh!) battery and car/wall charger for my camera.
- A suction-cup camera mount that will only be used in an entirely safe and responsible manner.
- The Korg DS-10, which is currently the most Korg you can possibly get for your money. Expect a full review later.
- A couple of splatter screens for my skillet.
- And as a complete surprise, a replacement set of air shocks for my CRX's hatch.

I think I made out pretty well. Oh, and even though it wasn't really a Christmas present, thank you Alan and Annie for the oatmeal raisin cookies. They were delicious. :)

I hope everyone is fat, happy, and not freezing/sliding/drowning/blowing away. Not joking about the drowning/blowing, either. We are seriously under a flash flood and tornado watch right now. Eeek.

Computer Driving Simulations

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:50:31 -0600

I don't think I've mentioned Racer here before. It's a driving simulation made by a mad Netherlander by the name of Ruud van Gaal. It's free (as in beer), comes for Mac, Linux, and Windows, and many downloadable cars and tracks are available for it. Racer is very much not a game — it's similar to GT4 or Forza, but lacks niceties like steering compensation, automatic clutching, and proper car AI. You cannot effectively play Racer unless you have at least an analog joystick, and it's really designed for use with force-feedback wheel controllers.

But because it's so configurable, you can leave the realm of the real and do nutty things like 900HP quad-bikes or cars that handle like slot-cars. A recent car that I downloaded was a 1987 Honda CRX Si (not the same body as mine — they switched to the new body in 1988). As it stands, it's not a bad car... but just for funsies, I decided to fork the space-time continuum.

Up until recently, Honda has not participated in rally racing. So I thought... what if Honda had been working on a Group B rally car based on the CRX, something to compete with the Renault 5 Turbo, but couldn't field it due to the fallout of Group B in 1986? What would such a car be like? Well, right now, it's a 185HP 2L 4WD monster that I like to call the "Honda CRX DRIFT LIKE A MADCUNT EDITION." I like it. :)

On very much the other end of automotive simulation, Alex has... borrowed... a copy of Tokyo Bus Guide, one of the most hardcore games in existence. I can see you laughing, but it is an unusually engaging and challenging game. You have to follow traffic laws, stop at bus stops, announce stops, and not crash into anything. If you hit a pedestrian or car, it's game over. But once you get the hang of it, it's really gratifying to get everything right. The game takes such razor-sharp concentration that hours will fly by as you crawl around town picking up and dropping off passengers. It's highly recommended.

Last night I was in the bathroom dropping the Huxtables off at the pool, and I realized that the turd sitting in the toilet was a sort of record of everything that I've eaten. And then I thought:

"I wonder if that's why they call it a log."

Still Alive Super Megamix

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 04:49:46 -0600

The song "Still Alive" is, to borrow Jonathan Coulton's poetry, a triumph. But did you know that there is a version of the song...

sung by Jonathan Coulton?
sung by Felicia Day at PAX? (Ah, Felicia, you're so wonderful...)
sung by the Pyro from Team Fotress 2?
in Japanese?
sung in English by Hatsune Miku, a voice synthesis program that only works well for Japanese?
done in Mario Paint Composer, a remake of the Mario Paint music composer?
played on an Intel 8080 microprocessor via a SID chip with ASCII graphics on two attached serial terminals?
remixed in the style of...
- melodic trance?
- euro house?
- hardcore rave?
- 8-bit bleep?
that plays from a homebrew NES ROM?
done a capella?
played by a player piano?
played on an ocarina?
played on a hacked exercise machine?

And there are two versions that aren't really new versions of the song, but have great visuals to go with them. Here is the song...

And now you know. And knowing is half the battle!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. :)

Monsanto Youtube Segfault Spectacular!

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 00:39:50 -0600

When browsing Google Video I came across a "documentary" called The World According to Monsanto. In the first ten minutes, the narrator lists some of Monsanto's accomplishments. "Agent Orange, aspartame, bovine growth hormones, PCBs..." while focusing on the Wikipedia page that listed these things.

PROTIP: In order to avoid undermining the reputability of your documentary, make sure you do not quote from Wikipedia sections marked "[citation needed]."

You may have noticed that Youtube has gone widescreen, but you may not have noticed that they're experimenting with 720p video. It's not available generally, but you can get to it by adding '&fmt=22' to the URL. Obviously, it's not going to work unless the original video is 720p, and there aren't many right now. To see an example, try out this clip of me racing a Lancia rally car downhill (in a video game).

Since processing 720p video is rather CPU-intensive, I decided today that I would get a cinelerra render node running on yomiko. This wouldn't be hard — I've compiled Cinelerra and most of its dependencies from scratch on my video editing machine. Or at least, it shouldn't be hard.

Being a Slackware nerd for about a decade now, compiling everything was a breeze. I got cinelerra working on a batch job and... it's much slower than it should be. This is running on an Opteron with all the assets on local disk, and it runs half as fast as it does rendering in the Cinelerra GUI with assets over NFS. It doesn't make any sense to me, but it also wasn't really a show-stopper.

In the process of upgrading several rather important packages, I created a problem where ffmpeg would segfault when using x264 as the codec. I tried updating x264 and ffmpeg to their latest versions, only to find that both projects had recently broken their ABIs. Taking a step back, I recompiled x264 and ffmpeg a dozen times while running through a git-bisect, but I only found the problem when I ran ffmpeg through a debugger and saw where it was crashing — I had compiled x264 statically, but there was a shared lib from the previous x264 lying around that ffmpeg was using. That fixed, everything was running along swimmingly.

Erickson postulated that if I did real, paid work for the amount of time spent dicking with this, I could afford a Mac Pro and a copy of Final Cut Pro. I told him that that having everything work the first time would be boring. The fact of the matter is, if I didn't spend those hours debugging, I would have spent them playing Racer.

Moral of the story: Maintaining Linux multimedia tools is like disco dancing on the shiny, blinking razorblade dancefloor of madness.

%!PS
(While debugging the ffmpeg/x264 debacle, I found the wonderfully lispy but unfortunately brain-damaged stumpwm hogging one of yomiko's CPUs. Stumpwm had crashed a couple weeks prior after attempting the extremely difficult task of resizing a window. Apparently, it decided that rather than stop execution like a normal program, it would enter an infinite loop and help keep the house warm. Thanks, stumpwm!) show

With My Freeze Ray...

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 02:55:41 -0600

In order to ensure your continued access to this blog, you are contractually obligated to watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Despite its name, it is, in fact, incredibly awesome. It is, without any hyperbole, the greatest supervillain musical ever made. And if that isn't enough to sell you, all I should have to say is that it was created by Joss and Jed Whedon. That's right. Go watch it. You're not legally allowed to read the rest of this entry until you do.

Full disclosure: I have a huge crush on Felicia Day. She is like, so awesome. :D

I don't generally like to talk about work here, but the last few days have been pretty extreme. I spent two days up in Northbrook putting together our new machine, and it was fraught with danger and peril at every turn. And by danger and peril, I mean late packages and soldering power connectors. But the machine is up and running and happy, so I'm happy.

Apple's Insomnia Film Festival site was apparently so terribly loaded that they postponed the contest until "after the holidays." I can't imagine how a company as big as Apple has could have fucked that up so badly, but by golly, they did. So last weekend James came down from Rockford anyway and we shot some footage for a new VFS. James wrote a really great skit that I think everyone will enjoy.

I've decided that in between all the fun over at the Dominion of Awesome, I could put up some actual educational content at the College. I made a simple creative writing utility called Write Stuff that gives you three random words and asks you to write something using them. I've slotted that into a new Literature Department. I've also created a Department of Practical Computation for fun computer things that currently houses only an empty blog. Erickson is also in on that one, so look forward to some hardcore geeking out.

And our dryer is broken again. :/

RAAAAAAAAAGE

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 01:54:49 -0600

Dear Apple,

Your Insomnia Film Festival site is broken. Inspecting the site reveals two clearly wrong methods of redirecting to http://insomnia.apple.com/c that are both inoperative in every browser I and my friends have tried (Firefox 3.0 on Windows/Linux/Mac and Safari on Mac). Manually going to http://insomnia.apple.com/c gets me to what I need, but then the site breaks and begins acting like the main apple.com. Curiously, it still works on one of my other computers. Sometimes. Maybe. The site is unresponsive to the point of uselessness.

After scratching my head for two days and wrangling with the site for an hour, I'm finally registered for your contest. I'm honestly dumbfounded as to how the simple act of getting an email address and a few personal details could have been cocked up so badly. I understand that the economic crisis has been hard on all of us, but in the future, please resist the urge to hire your web admins from the local high school.

Regrettably yours,
~chip

Opening Up

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 01:00:31 -0600

Since its inception here on bytex64.net, I've had the /blog/ section completely forbidden to indexing by robots.txt-compliant web spiders. I did this for a few reasons.

In the beginning, my site was sharing webspace with someone else, and I wanted to tread lightly. Being searchable means a lot more visitors, and I wasn't confident that my site could handle it if I got listed somewhere. In retrospect, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have. I've improved performance quite a bit since then, but I still don't think I could handle a slashdotting (even with /. in its decline).

Also, I like being a recluse. I don't always say nice things, and if those things are easy to find, people may get the wrong idea about me. This is, of course, unnecessarily paranoid. Furthermore, it's opposed to my ideals of openness and Constructive Bastardism. I wrote these things because that's who I am, and I shouldn't hide it.

More recently, I've been getting spambots, and being un-indexed provides a significant disincentive to spammers because their links will go un-noticed by search engines. Still, they come around occasionally, and some comment spam is designed to fool humans, not computers.

So I've decided to open things up by removing the robots.txt entry for /blog/, and damn the torpedoes.

To this end, I've hardened the comment entry system. Most HTML is still allowed, but attributes are restricted to prevent javascript and CSS shenanigans, and people posting flash or java applets will be... punished. If spam becomes a problem, expect the addition of some kind of captcha. This, of course, only applies to guests. I can still do whatever the hell I want. :-P

Hello, World. :)

Songbird: The 800 Pound Gorilla of Music Players

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:55:11 -0600

Slashdot announced that Songbird, a comprehensive music playing application built on top of Mozilla and GStreamer, has released a 1.0 RC build. The article hails it as an alternative to iTunes. Erickson, being an Apple user interested in alternatives to iTunes, tried it out to see if it had improved any from its bloated beta years.

Spoilers: It hadn't.

As I watched him use it, it seemed sluggish on his MacBook Pro, and he reported that it was using a third of one of his cores just to play music. Because I wanted to share in the fun, I loaded it up on my laptop to see just how bad it was.

Starting it up, it immediately claimed 30 or so megs. That's not unusual, it is based on the heaviest lightweight browser out there. (Aside: Does anyone still remember when Firefox actually was lightweight?) Walking through the initial wizard, it was using a cool 70MB, but once I let it loose on my collection, the memory usage began to climb. 90MB... 100MB... 110MB... it passed up Firefox at 110, and continues onward to 120 as I write this. I think they might still have some leaks to plug. Aaaaaand... it has stopped at a whopping 132MB of ram. For those at home without calculators, that's 34% of the physical memory in that machine.

Curiously, the memory usage drops when I begin playing around with Songbird. Playing a bog-standard MP3 from my collection ticks over the CPU at 20%, though. For pure computrons, that's much better than Erickson was seeing, but it's still disturbingly excessive. On the plus side, the slow, clunky interface does look nice. :/

By comparison, my music organization and playing solution, which is comprised of mplayer and the computer equivalent of bubble gum and baling wire, uses about 11MB of memory and ~2.5% CPU including an xterm. Granted, my system doesn't have a GUI, but I consider that to be a feature. Hell, foobar2000 running under wine is faster, uses less memory, has more features, and may well be more stable than Songbird.

If Apple users are excited about Songbird, I can only conclude that iTunes fucking blows. Oh, well. I guess you get what you pay for.

Oh, wait...

A New Era Dawns

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 05:14:47 -0600

I barely fought off the urge to end my last post with "OH WAIT, WE DID. YOU ARE ALL FUCKING MORONS," but I felt that it would undermine my point. I just want everyone who has said that I should get a myspace/facebook account to understand: I really do genuinely and desperately want to punch you in the face.

Yesterday I saw history made: we elected our first United States President that wasn't an old white guy. It's a milestone, but I think the reality of it is said best (as it usually is) by The Onion: Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress. Personally, I'm just relieved that we were able to elect a president without bickering over results that were within the margin of error.

I find myself quite impressed at Obama's victory. I'm not impressed with Obama specifically — we will see in time whether he has the right stuff to make good on his promises. What I'm most impressed with is that the majority of people believe in him. That instead of a world of fear and uncertainty, they believe in a world of hope and change. Obama is our new leader, but it is these people who will make change happen. And that gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling about our country that I don't think I've ever felt before.

Here's to all the people who have made and will make this happen.

A New Kind of Facebook

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:05:01 -0600

I've been thinking about Facebook. An article likens Facebook to a "virtual student center" where people come to hang out online even though they can't meet face to face. And then I got to thinking... Why does Facebook have to have all the fun? Couldn't we spread that idea to the whole web?

The whole thing would have to center around personal expression and the connections we make with others. So first, there will have to be a kind of presentation language that people can use to create personalized spaces. And to show relationships, the language will have a way of referencing spaces created by other people — a "link" if you will. With these "spaces" and "links," we can create an an interconnected world that allows people to find others with similar interests.

And of course we must provide communication for our users. People like using different methods of communication for different situations, so we should provide an array of methods from casual to formal, point-to-point to broadcast. For casual communication, we'll create a simple instant messaging system, while more formal "mailbox" style messages will require a store and forward messaging system. There should be a public chat system and forums for public discourse. And of course, people will want a place to write entries that everyone can see, and inverting that idea, a system like the Facebook wall where everyone can post comments or congratulations. And of course, people will want a centralized way of organizing notifications for important events and postings to tie it all together.

To duplicate Facebook's "applications" we can create a standardized interface for writing interactive applications on the web which will use standardized methods for inter-site communications. The client-side of these applications can leverage existing Flash, Silverlight, and Javascript technologies for a truly next-generation experience. With an application platform in place, many useful web applications and widgets will be created by our users. People will no doubt also want to share pictures of themselves drunk at parties, so there should be an application that allows you to easily share photos with your friends.

And no system of such lofty information capacity should be without a search system. Unfortunately, it's beyond me how such a wide-reaching beast of a database could be designed, so I guess we'll just have to wait until an enterprising group creates such a system.

It's a lofty dream, but wouldn't it be great if we could create something like this? :D

Boo

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 05:24:16 -0600

I used to read Megatokyo a lot, but I stopped reading it when it was the only site to break in my new experimental comicflipper. It's still on my list, though, and it has an ad for one of my favorite shows, Ouran High School Host Club. The ad asks, "Which type is your favorite?"

Fans of the series will recognize that one of those is a female. Those unfamiliar with the series may ask, "Only one?"

It seems that my git snafu a few weeks ago broke RSS as well. It should be fixed, now.

Despite my best efforts, I wound up having a rather fun Halloween weekend. Friday afternoon, Erickson rounded up a motley crew whose names I regretfully misremember, and we hit the thrift stores in town for costume ideas. Well, two thrift stores and Dandelion, which is like a thrift store in that it has old clothes, but is unlike a thrift store in that they charge normal prices. They also have what may be the largest collection of out-of-style sunglasses in the state. At Goodwill, I bought a deep fryer without a power cord for $3, and at the Salvation Army, Erickson and I seriously pondered a $400 projection HDTV that upon further research, turned out to be a lemon.

That night, Alex, Andrea, and I went to a Halloween party thrown by my former roommate Lauren. Campy and creepy movies were played in the garage, and we watched Sleepaway Camp and the original Nosferatu. Sleepaway Camp was hilariously bad. Alex and I were cracking jokes MST3K-style throughout the whole thing. Nosferatu was brilliantly done for a silent movie from 1922, and I recommend it as an example of pioneering filmmaking.

Saturday, I went with a large group of Atmos folks and associated friends to the Dutch Kitchen in Arcola. If you somehow wind up in Amish Illinois, it's a great place to get a home-cooked meal and a slice of shoo-fly pie.

I just got done watching The Postman, a feel-good movie about the end of the world. Things I have learned from this movie:

Performing Shakespeare for children will get you nothing but trouble.
Real Men like The Sound of Music.
If you're starving and desperate, lying will solve all your problems.
- Corollary: Almost everyone believes Kevin Costner even if he is lying.
If a married woman solicits you for sex, run away.
Some lies, when told to morally upstanding people, will actually make the world a better place.
... but not before they cause entire towns to be annihilated.
When a pregnant woman decides to leave an encampment, it is normal for them to burn it to the ground.
In post-apocalyptic America, aging rock stars will become city officials.
Deep philosophical differences between armies can be solved by a fistfight between their leaders.
After you win the fistfight, people will lay down their arms if you just ask politely. A peaceful, democratic society will naturally follow.

Alex and I agreed that the movie had a number of good scenes and ideas, but lost itself somewhere along the way. He is now committed to writing a better version which can then be made in Bollywood for less than $1000.

Is everyone ready to vote? :)

CITIZENS REQUIRE MORE PUNK

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:56:32 -0500

I have been desperately needing more Me First and the Gimme Gimmes in my life. I went up to Kankakee last weekend for the baptism of Dana and Patsy's new child, Lily Grace James. My old roommate Scott was there, and delivered the Gimme Gimmes from his massive MP3 collection. I also got some Millencolin, No Use For A Name, NOFX, Pennywise, Skankin' Pickle, and others. I'm happy. :)

I'm still stumped on a Halloween costume. My working idea now is the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland. Erickson and I thought it would be really awesome to be Daft Punk, and it would be awesome — but at this point, I think it's too late to get even a basic outfit together, let alone one with blinkenlights.

I have a couple of new comics to recommend, from opposite ends of the spectrum. Misfile is a story about a couple of teenagers who, through a heavenly filing mishap, wind up with their lives terribly re-arranged. Ash is a guy winds up as a girl, and Emily is a high school senior who loses the last two years of her life and finds herself a sophomore again. Curiously, there is also street racing. Think Kashimashi plus Initial D plus Ah My Goddess. It starts off like most crappy webcomics, but improves drastically as it goes. If you're looking for a cross-gender love story with divine intervention and a lot of geeking out about cars, it's... well, it's probably the only one you'll ever find.

The second webcomic is The Zombie Hunters, a story about a group of "chaotic shortbus" bounty hunters and their misadventures in a zombie-infested world. The story is well done, the art is well done, and it's about zombies. Deviating a little bit from your traditional zombie mythos, there are several classes of zombies. Some are relatively harmless, like the Mercy, but crank up the creepy to 11. It's highly recommended.

And now, I'm going to go drink plenty of fluids and sleep, because I feel ill. :(

A Curious Warning

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 03:03:58 -0500

I got a letter from the University today. The relevant portion:

The University of Illinois recently learned that a computer in the Department of Biochemistry was compromised by a computer virus for a short time. The computer held some personal data on students and staff of the Department, which included your name and University Identification Number (UIN).

This is not so much worrying as confusing for me, as I have never been a student or staff in the Department of Biochemistry. I'm pretty sure I've never taken a biology class at UIUC, period.

Why then, am I apparently in their database?

Also I bought Mega Man 9. IT IS AWESOME (AND INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT).

Coding in Tongues

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 03:00:06 -0500

On a whim, I decided to walk through a Ruby tutorial. I've installed the ruby interpreter in my last two Slackware installs, but I've never used it. A couple of tutorials later, I understand how it works, and it irritates me in much the same way Perl must irritate C and shell programmers. "You've just shoved a bunch of features from other languages in here without regard for how they fit together!" Ruby is basically a lot of Perl and Python ideas and a few Smalltalk ideas thrown together. Proponents would argue that it combines the best of all those languages. As someone who already knows Perl and Python, it's like a train wreck in my brain. I can blame part of this on the terrible tutorial I found. Google for "ruby tutorial," it's the first one. It suggested that I do a loop like this:

list.each do |x|
    frobnicate x
end

Instead of the much more sensical:

for x in list
    frobnicate x
end

But mostly, I like Perl for being a concise "do what I mean" language, and I like Python for being a clear, verbose OO environment. And I'm quite happy to keep them separate, thankyouverymuch.

Lisp, on the other hand, seems to be much more elegant. Or at least that's what I've been told. Browsing the GNU Common Lisp site, I'm finding a lot of spiel about how Lisp is great, and that it's the solution to all my problems, but not much information on how to actually program in Lisp. For the record, please consider that a comment on the egotism of Lisp hackers. :-P

Lisp, in the lore of ancient hackers, is the second evolutionary divergence in programming. The first was the development of high-level languages like Fortran. Lisp then re-defined what "high-level" meant. Lisp is still one of the only languages that makes little distinction between code and data. A piece of code in lisp can re-arrange another piece of code, allowing a programmer to make the kind of optimizations in his program that would usually only happen in an advanced compiler. Given these feats, it is unfortunate that Lisp is so visually ambiguous.

In Lisp, everything is a kind of list. The language, by what I guess must be convention, takes the first thing in the list to be a function, and the rest are arguments. Except when a list is a list of arguments, or something else. Lisp takes lexical orthogonality to absurd extremes with a handful of actual punctuation marks that can be used nearly anywhere. This lack of formal structure in Lisp makes it hard to read. Take, for example, a function definition:

(defun foo (bar baz) (quux glarch))

And tell me what bar does (hint: it's not the same thing that quux or defun does). As a linguist, I find this kind of ambiguity highly unnerving. Imagine trying to understand someone who only communicated using spoken nouns and hand gestures. That's what Lisp looks like.

I leave you with this moment of Zen I found in my fortune cookie:

Your present plants are going to succeed. .
Lucky #.3, 15, 20, 21, 36, 40
Learn Chinese: Yan-Zi, 燕子, A Sallow

The Walls Are So Soft

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 03:26:17 -0500

You might expect that Fortran, a language developed in the dark ages of computing, would be an unsafe language with little or no data integrity assurances in the compiler or the runtime.

You would be absolutely right.

One of the fun facets of Fortran is that all arguments are pass-by-reference. That is, when an argument is passed to a procedure, what you're really doing is telling the function where your original variable is. Because of this, a Fortran subroutine can run around willy nilly in the dummy variables (the Fortran way of saying "arguments") you've passed in, changing anything it wants. And because Fortran doesn't check array bounds when arrays are passed to procedures, a subroutine can say "This array that was passed in is this big," and then go mucking about with memory that the caller didn't pass in.

What happens, then, if one of your arguments is a constant value? The answer, amusingly enough, is undefined. Some compilers (on complicit architectures) will store that constant in a static data area, and when it's dummy variable is assigned to, happily overwrite the "constant" value with something else. If you don't use that constant elsewhere, the program will hum along blissfully ignorant. If you do use it elsewhere, it's possible that you've subtly changed the operation of your program, and you'll have a lot of fun debugging it. Better compilers (and architectures that have hardware enforcement of read-only memory areas) will produce an access protection violation and kill the program so that the programmer can (hopefully) find the error. Really good compilers will detect these kinds of shenanigans at compile time if you ask nicely, but I'm talking out of my ass here — I don't really know if such compilers exist.

The moral of the story is: If you have an opportunity to maintain old Fortran code, especially if said maintenance requires getting it working on a new architecture, run. For the sake of your sanity, run fast; run far.

As for me, I'm typing this with my nose. The nice men in lab coats say that if I'm good, they'll untie the strait-jacket and I can type with my hands, but only if I can convince them there won't be a repeat of last time.

Hee hee hee hee heeeeeeee...

Weeaboo-arific Metafiction-tastic

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:36:40 -0500

I like metafiction. Metafiction is the use of a story within a story to provide reference or counterpoint to the enclosing story. Used well, it can introduce a viewpoint that the audience may not have considered, provide insight into the characters of a story, or advance the plot in novel ways. Popular examples include Tales of the Black Freighter inside Watchmen and the Mind Fantasy Game inside Ender's Game.

I've been re-watching Densha Otoko, the purportedly true story of a geek who gets help from anonymous people on the internet to help impress a girl. The particular version I'm watching is the TV drama, which does a really good job of making you hope you never meet a Japanese nerd in person. In this drama, the protagonist and his friends are fans of an anime called "Getsumen Heiki Mina." The animation studio that did the shorts for Densha Otoko, GONZO, decided to turn the metafictional story into an actual series, Getsumento Heiki Mina.

I just finished another anime series, Love GetChu, which contains no less than three metafictional universes. In the story, a group of girls aspire to be voice actresses, and so several metafictional anime series show up. In this way, the show explains aspects of the real-life voice acting profession, and through the metafictional series, pokes fun at itself and other anime. The other interesting thing about Love GetChu is that it's based on a cell phone game. That seemed weird to me until I realized that an interactive visual fiction game (read: dating sim) would be easy to do within the confines of a cell phone, and there are probably a lot of lonely men commuting on the Tokyo train system that would love that sort of thing.

I'm in the middle of a third series, Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto. It has a little metafiction in a different vein. The story is about Sora Suzuki, a girl from Hokkaido who travels to Tokyo for training to become a mage. It sounds like Harry Potter, but it's not. By that I mean that like Harry Potter, it deals with young people and magic, but unlike Harry Potter, it doesn't pander to little kids who want to use magic to get revenge on the bullies who shove their head down a toilet on a daily basis. The show uses photorealistic CG backgrounds, particularly in the Shimokitazawa borough of Tokyo. In Shimokitazawa, there is a woman who performs songs on the street. And there we are, metafictional music. :)

And for something that is not metafictional, I just found out that there is a new season of ef - a tale of memories called ef - a tale of melodies. If I haven't said so here, ef is quite possibly the most depressing twelve episodes of anything I have ever watched. If you are feeling good about your life and your friends and yourself, ef will fix that. It does have a happy ending, but it was probably put in as a concession so that viewers didn't go hang themselves after the series ended. It's very good, though, and I can recommend it highly. Just, uh, don't watch it if you're already depressed.

Slowpoke Reporting In

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:03:57 -0500

You know it's been a while since you've read your feeds when your own blog has five new articles. You know it's been a really long time when Kuro5hin has six new articles. I am now officially lagging behind the slowest news site in the universe.

I've been browsing backward through my archives, finding technical articles. I was talking to Alex one day about how he tries his best to make his HOWTOs and such web searchable. Since the entire /blog/ section here is off limits to robots, I decided to put useful articles on a Blogger site. I certainly could rig up something here, but having Google handle that effectively solves the primary problem: getting the content indexed so that people can find it. Note that I'm not splitting the blog. All content will still exist here, but some of it is now in a more public place.

Reading old articles has brought up a bunch of forgotten bits and pieces. I completely forgot about Deviantart, for example, and I found that Nothing Nice to Say has actually updated in the last three years. And of course, a website reaching back over ten years of my memory, Hitoshi Doi's Sailor Moon page.

Are you excited about the VP debate tomorrow? I sure am, even though it's going to be a oh-god-is-it-over-yet train wreck while I watch through one open eye as I hold my hands in front of my face. I suggested to Erickson that we turn it into a game — take a drink every time Palin clearly doesn't understand the question. Erickson replied that "people might need to drive home..."

I think it's a sign that I'm maturing (read: growing old and stale) that I don't find Love Hina as comforting as I used to. Perhaps it's because I don't see myself as a bumbling Keitaro anymore, or perhaps it's because now even I think he's an idiot for putting up with Naru. She's violent, possessive, bipolar, jealous, at times arguably insane, and oh, yes, incredibly hot — i.e. the kind of girl I typically fawn all over. Maybe I'm finally growing out of that.

I leave you with this: If we were playing a game of Civilization, would you try to fix the US, or would you quit the game and start over?