throw it on the fire

Postcard Sci-Fi

2008-11-03T17:16:00.000-08:00

Automatic sub-versioning with XCode, Addendum

2008-10-28T18:49:00.000-07:00

I was working on a very similar solution to the one Daniel Jakult presents for this problem, when a co-worker pointed me to the aforementioned post. I'd never heard of svnversion (bad me, I know), and, since I gleaned useful things from his original post, it's only fair I reciprocate with my improved script.

So, without further adieu, here it is. Follow his instructions for use; the trick is right-clicking the "Run Script" build phase and copying this script directly into the dialog. Make sure that "Shell" is set to /usr/bin/perl (add -w too, preferably).

A stellar day.

2008-03-19T13:46:00.001-07:00

Gabe, whom I always trust to always keep me up-to-date on the universe outside of my little contrived one, IM'ed to inform me that today - March 19th 2008 or 08-03-19, depending on how you write it - saw not one, two, or even three, but four gamma ray bursts observed by Swift (making today the first time in history for such a frequency).

One of them (080319B) was so bright as to be visible to the naked eye, albeit briefly, even considering that at a redshift of 0.937 it is about eight billion light years distant. With an apparent magnitude of about 5, it was almost as bright as Uranus: now that is one bright-ass 8-billion-year-old exploding star.

As an aside, don't forget to thank your favorite astronomer today for doing absolutely necessary and cutting-edge work. Getting a machine like Swift into space and then automating it well enough to have it find bursts like this without any human intervention is an incredible achievement. As Gabe says:

Transient astronomy is badass.
And really hard.

Update 03/30/08: here's the Wikipedia page on GRB 080319B, which highlights that this burst was even more remarkable than I realized; it set a record for the furthest object ever visible by naked eye. I say goddamn.

the monster, incarnate part duex

2008-02-28T09:06:00.000-08:00

The term "web 2.0" has always particularly irked me: who decided it was time to bump the "version number", and much more importantly, why?

Everyone knows the story: Sir Tim Berners-Lee at CERN writes some newfangled "hypertext" thing, hooks it into some unknown "Internet" thing, and the WWW is born. Millions of people join services like AOL and Compuserve, the majority to look at a few very static web pages and find porn on the much-older and more established (read: more porn) USENET forums.

We might call this time "web 0.0", if we were into such things, but we're really not. In any event, it was certainly the dark ages of the web: finding content even remotely related to your topic of interest (sans porn, of course) was immensely difficult, and once found, you'd usually end up sated if only because the painful task was complete and cease the search right there.

The next age would bring light into the world of the web, but it would be the neon light of commercialism.

This age was, of course, the famed Dot-com boom. Recollection here should be immediate, so I won't bore with details. Suffice it to say the free market finally realized what these "Internets" might be good for, and capitalized with reckless abandon. This is also about the time that the age of web crawlers^[1] was dawning: useful tools no doubt, but much more so when the haystack is as small as it was then.

So while these new tools might help you find a bit of meagerly useful content (mostly static, unattributed, and never primary source), in reality they just made it easy to find the best place to buy books or pet supplies, sell your car, your body, or even your soul. You can pour money into the monster indefinitely, but it'll always want more.

By the time the boom busted, the haystack had grown a lot larger. We're talking big. And it just kept growing, but it wasn't getting much easier to find anything unique, interesting; new. A couple of hippies named Sergey and Larry thought they had found a better way of searching the haystack, and they had... kind of. Searching more of the haystack faster and with more forethought is great, but we're still talking evolution - not revolution - here kids.

The problem wasn't that people weren't publishing to this medium. Without a way to publish and a way to propagate, content languished in obscurity and its authors quickly lost interest in producing more. It was that the signal - the unique content - was getting utterly drowned out by the noise: what are search engines but impressive noise filters anyway?

My point of this whole diatribe is this: its not a coincidence that the "social" web (the true meat-n-potatoes of this new age) and the "blogosphere"^[2] have grown up in lock-step.

Case in point: del.icio.us. On the surface a minimalistic tool for storing links and categorizing them. Used to it's fullest it's an amazing way to find content that is much more likely to be of interest to you, if only because you've gone from relying on an algorithm's choice and are now relying on another human for guidance.^[3] Without any extra effort of course, because we're nothing if not lazy.

It helps me to think of it like so: "web 2.0" and the social connectivity it has endowed have allowed all the single "point sources" of information (content producers) in the "universe" of the web to begin to organize themselves into more closely-connected groups. Only here can the self-publishing of primary source content thrive.

Each new piece of content is a signal, being sent out by its publishing site: it has some "strength" and therefore can only travel a certain "distance"^[4]. In the early web, the content producers were so "far apart" that the signal was never picked up, so it dissipated. Now, the simple fact that content producers have begun to move "closer together" allows even low-energy signals to be picked up by another and possibly "retransmitted" (attributed, linked-to, etc), amplifying its impact in the space.

The "social" web has moved these sources closer. It has brought sources that were producing similar content to the point where nearly every signal is picked up by at least one other interested party, because the "distances" involved are so much smaller. This is why Gruber will consistently get picked up by TUAW and the like, but wouldn't ever be seen on Kos. Gruber and TUAW are seperated by a short distance; Kos is quite distant from both, but not at all far from a source such as The Hotline.

Now I realize this must be approaching a thousand words or so, and the writers at Valleywag would have my nuts for this, so it's time to Wrap. It. Up.

What is "web 2.0"? The technology hasn't really changed (bring up AJAX, get my fist in your face), so what did? People, and the way they use it, of course: we stopped searching the haystack one-by-one and started helping each other. Marx would be proud; the social revolution has begun!

--
[1] My choice back in the day was none other than the O.G. Gansta' itself, WebCrawler.
[2] For the record, a term far worse than "web 2.0".
[3] Yahoo! tried this for a long time, but through a single point of contact, and it's no wonder it failed. And no wonder they were the ones who bought Del.icio.us.
[4] When I speak of distance here, I mean in an abstract space of semantic distance where the further away two points are the harder it is for one to "hear of" and become interested in another.

CSI: Santa Rosa

2007-12-18T16:05:00.000-08:00

Hedwig flew this onto my desk this morning:

I am a Police Detective assigned to the Northern California Computer Crimes Task Force [NC³TF] in Napa, CA. Our task force covers 13 counties in Northern California (including Sonoma!) and provides computer and cell phone forensic analysis services to local law enforcement agencies. Our first iPhone came into the office last week as part of a murder investigation. The suspect used his iPhone to send and receive text messages before and after the crime and the information became critical to the investigation. We were able to obtain much of the phone’s data by parsing the backup files created when syncing the phone with iTunes. The problem became how to “translate” the information into a format that could be understood by non-technical investigators.

That is when we found your software. Syphone was able to quickly and accurately display the SMS messages in a format that will undoubtedly be understood by the officers, attorneys and more importantly, the jury.

So friggin' cool.

I may have written a big chunk of a gaming platform that millions use every day, but this is one of the coolest uses for software penned by my hand that I think I'll ever hear of. A murder nonetheless: damn son!

(Note: emphasis and hyperlinks added to quoted text.)

WebKit 3, mobile release?

2007-11-19T12:44:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that the 1.1.2 release of the iPhone firmware packaged a version of MobileSafari that is substantially faster at loading large pages, especially JavaScript-heavy pages. This is entirely speculative, but it looks like the iPhone surreptitiously got in on the new hotness that is WebKit 3.

Apple released both 10.5.1 and 10.4.11 recently, updating Tiger to ensure that even the previous OS had access to all the good new stuff in WebKit 3. As 1.1.2 was released just about the same time as these updates to OS X, it seems entirely logical that Apple pushed these changes into "mobile" OS X as well, especially considering all the talk about JavaScript's unfortunate performance on the iPhone to date.

~~Anyone done any digging? Let me know.~~

Update: Swannman suggested a simple-yet-effective method I'd completely missed for proof: user agent strings! Without further adieu, the proof is in the pudding:

-- Safari 3 on 10.5.1 reports:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-us) 
AppleWebKit/523.10.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) 
Version/3.0.4 Safari/523.10

-- MobileSafari on iPhone 1.1.2 reports:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en-us) 
AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) 
Version/3.0 Safari/419.3

So while it looks like MobileSafari on 1.1.2 may not be running the latest-and-greatest version of WebKit, it is definitely endowed with a version in the 3.0 family, and one I'd gather has the majority of the speed increases touted in the "10 new things" post.

Now the really interesting question: what user agent does MobileSafari prior to 1.1.2 purport to be? Anyone with an older iPhone OS version can quickly hit this link and fire an email my way with the results, so we can put this one to rest once and for all.

Yearn for thee, ZFS

2007-11-06T19:42:00.000-08:00

My sister called me tonight, frustrated and frantic. She's working in iMovie for the final project of her college career, and OS X keeps yelling at her that her startup disk is full (and it is; only 190 megabytes remain). "It won't even let me add the last frames of the movie" she exclaims: it's clear that something must be done, and quickly.

As we sat talking through all the possibilities for clearing up disk space temporarily - most of which she's a bit squeamish to attempt solo - I mentioned that she could just use her backup drive to offload a part of her massive collection of pre-NBC-bitchslap "Office" episodes to clear up a good chunk of space for a while, then move them back when done. After whining about the time investment even that would take, eventually she assented: what else was she to do?

This is always when my ~~inner~~¹ geek tends to chime in: "If only she were using ZFS... a startup disk that was really just a pool could add space from the backup drive no és problema!" (Yeah, my inner geek has a bit of Mexican in him.)

Unfortunately so far, it's only been the nerds and fanboys that have cared, or even known about ZFS's (albeit read-only) inclusion in the release of Leopard. As such, the Mac-using public marches along with a file system that was originally introduced² the same year my nearly-college-graduate sister was born. So sayeth "The Architect" himself:

"We've rethought everything and rearchitected it," says Jeff Bonwick, Sun distinguished engineer and chief architect of ZFS. "We've thrown away 20 years of old technology that was based on assumptions no longer true today."

If Apple Geniuses could tell Paul Photoguy or Greg Garagebandman that they could take that LaCie 1TB drive home and immediately add it as extra capacity to their pre-existing storage setup, I imagine the public as a whole would start getting a lot more excited about things like next-generation file systems... because dammit, we nerds are!

[1] I don't think I qualify for having an "inner" geek: it's all outer geek baby, geek all over.
[2] Yes, I know it was regular HFS released in 1985, and not HFS+. Even still, HFS+ is nearly ten years old at this point, besting ZFS by seven years.

Eh, don't worry, it's only 0.0004%.

2007-11-05T10:53:00.000-08:00

We make a product that, during the course of it's work, does a bit 'o disk partitioning. On Intel hardware (which uses the newer GUID Partition Table), Apple has defined a 128 megabyte "gap" partition that is created after any partition on large-enough disks. If you're a developer writing code that will be manipulating the partition table, you usually want to ensure that you stick exactly to the "letter of the law"; in this case, whatever Apple does is all the truth and justice you need. As diligent developers, our software respects this gap when creating the partition(s) it needs.

But when Leopard was released, we kept getting tech support calls exclaiming that any machines that had been partitioned using our software were failing to install the new OS successfully. Days went by and our QA couldn't reproduce it; then someone from Apple calls directly. Turns out it was our code: the gap partition we created was inexplicably one block too small. Since hardware block size is 512 bytes, and the gap partition is 128 megabytes, this accounted for a discrepancy of but 0.00038% of the total bytes in that gap partition. ~~And it was hosing people's machines.~~ Update: turns out the symptom was unwanted behavior in the installer (informing users they had to reformat their drives, something most didn't want to do) rather than actual data loss. Still, no good.

An effort was launched to track down the problem, and after pouring through code that no man should have ever put to disk in the first place, the offender was found.

As it all too often turns out, the problem was minor miscalculation in a small part of a larger calculation to determine the starting and ending addresses for the new gap partition. Considering that these "gap" partitions are just that, blank gaps left there to ease future software development, we were apparently getting by with the fact that no system app or installer actually checked to ensure these gaps were of the "required" size.

That is, of course, until the Leopard installer. In which Apple decided, for the first time, to check and enforce the size of these partitions, causing the installer failures we've been hearing about constantly lately. All because our code calculated 262,143 when it really meant 262,144.

If you've ever skimped on testing a bit of code where you thought an off-by-one bug might be lurking but weren't sure, hopefully now you see how much harm even 0.0004% can cause. (Especially when you're writing dangerous code to muck with partition tables directly!) Just imagine what would could have gone wrong if the offending code had been in a more sensitive or destructive algorithm than it was...

great review, but dammit if you don't love everything

2007-10-29T12:22:00.000-07:00

As Mr. Gruber says, John Siracusa has been consistently been writing the best reviews of new Apple OSes for years, including his newest on 10.5 'Leopard', which is spot on... almost. While he does manage to link back here on page 4 when talking about the new "translucent" menu bar (which he confirms is using Core Image as a background filter, something we'd figured was the case for a while), he disagrees that even the newest iteration is better than the traditional solid white bar.

As far as I see it, Apple is trying to encourage people to dress up their desktops with fancy backgrounds, and considering the level of transparency that's always existed in other always-on-screen elements like the dock (if you don't hide yours like me, that is), I think it plays well into the overall look of the new desktop.

To everyone wandering over here from the review, to John himself, and all the new menu bar haters out there, I say this: after using 10.5 for a few weeks continuously, go back and use a Tiger system for a bit. I can almost guarantee that the most striking difference you'll notice won't be the old dock, or the old window styles (though those will be still be surprising, too): it will be that flat white menu bar glaring at you from the top of your screen.

(In all honesty though, no one manages to cover all the most important - and contentious - points in an OS review like Mr. Siracusa does. If you only read one Leopard review, it damn well should be this one... it's from Ars after all, so you know it'll be worth your time.)

The Cat's been groomed

2007-08-30T16:38:00.000-07:00

After all the brou-ha-ha we went through a few months ago over Leopard 9A410's incredibly well-meaning but decidedly under-achieving new "semi" transparent menu bar (even to the point of it being hacked within days to remove said transparency), I'm surprised I haven't seen any discussion on the 'tubes of late related to the fairly massive change showcased in build 9A527 to the menu bar, which is unfortunate because it turns out Apple actually listened to all our bitching and moaning.

I'm one of those people who think OS X's ability to auto-rotate desktop backgrounds is one of those little killer features that just does it for us. As such, I've a large array of disparate desktop backgrounds: some very high contrast, some low, some very dark and some very light. So you can imagine the transparency used in 9A410 caused more than a few problems, especially with certain images. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so it's time to be loquacious:

(9A410)

Yikes.

Sure, it's legible, if you sit and stare and the text for a while. But keep a bottle of Advil handy, because your head isn't going to thank you for it.

I've enough backgrounds like this that 9A410 was - at times - almost completely unusable (until I switched the background of course, but I'm lazy). As any Machead knows, the menu bar is pretty much the only system-wide UI element that you simply must be able to see and have quick at-a-glance access to at all times. (In fact, while many people chide me for it, I auto-hide my Dock and pretend for the most part that it doesn't even exist: Quicksilver FTW, baby.)

So after all this, what has Apple learned?

(9A527)

Well I'll be a monkey's uncle.

Exact same background, a few months of extra development time for Apple, and we see a world of difference. Now I'm definitely on-board...

...at least with regards to the menu bar.

The Foolish Day

2007-04-02T00:46:00.000-07:00

Those of us in the geek-o-sphere know all too well that April 1st is nothing more than that day each year we either completely ignore or irrationally obsess over what the Oracle (Slashdot, that'd be) and all the other - albeit freakin' awesome - morsels of non-truth that invade the tubes have to say for these scary twenty-four hours of worthlessness.

Sure, ThinkGeek's tie is super-cool, but the fact that they're actually going to put it into production lessens it's April-Fools-Joke cred. It's no joke anymore when that one guy at work you can't stand gets all the attention because he comes in wearing it. So I'm here to tell you the story about the best April Fool's joke this side of the party of 1999.

For weeks, Adult Swim has been running spots informing the faithful that none other than the world premiere of the for-wide-release film Colon Movie Film for Theaters was to take place this Sunday, April 1st, at 10:30 on Adult Swim. That'd be the one staring those unimaginably-popular talking detective food items and their lovable pool-owning neighbor. On the cable television channel, mixing the mediums; w.t.f. mate. Of course they already knew the joke was on us, ending the commercials with the line: "Why? Because we're f**king crazy!"

I was in such disbelief I spent a good inebriated thirty minutes Googling the hell out the intarwebs trying to dig up what was really going on. Uncovering nothing, their secret was well-hidden until tonight, and I'm here to share the sheer marketing genius with you.

As flabbergasting as it sounds, they did indeed premiere a film in it's entirety tonight on Adult Swim. Of course, it was in a box that was, percentage-wise, about 1%-by-3% of the entire screen, or even less. Overlaid on the regularly-scheduled program, audio disabled of course. They even interspersed nearly-full-screen ad overlays for the movie every ten minutes or so, the most obnoxious of which had the "Ghost of Christmas Past" robot making sweet love to a 1980s-style rabbit-ear television, complete with full machine-on-machine love sounds drowning out the brilliant Seth McFarlane playing rightfully in the background. True to their word, though, with eyes like an eagle and the ability to lip-read a talking ball of meat you would have indeed enjoyed the entire film.

As I sat squinting painfully, the voice of Farva kept looping in my head: "Ohhhhhohoho, I got you good you fuckers!"

* * *
On an almost-entirely unrelated note: I didn't realize until tonight that, even for a show that is only as funny as those awkward jokes your half-retarded cousin would stutter out, Sealab 2021 has the best damn theme song I've ever heard. The Naked Trucker and T-Bones Show comes damn close though: America's a farmer's daughter, I just can't leave her alone...

* * *
This next foolish day event might still turn out to be a big joke on me, but until it does I'm pretty stoked to be able to announce that a story you read right here first was, surprisingly enough, published in the 365 Tomorrows anthology. A permalink hangs out right here, since by the time you've read this (all one of you), that ever-restrictive fourth dimension will have likely moved on - as it tends to do - and they'll have posted a new story.
Just a note for the curious: Ahoten Sulciphur is none other than a contrived avatar-slash-pen-name I've been hiding behind for a while now.

Odor of an Old Goat

2007-01-19T20:00:00.000-08:00

My plastic-and-metal stead was in dire need of some T.L.C., and after an aborted first attempt at service for lack of an ability to make appointments (or even inquire if they're necessary), I managed to get my name on the magic list for "anytime" Friday. I, in form, was the last "appointment" of the day, and after a minute or so I couldn't quite figure out why my walk-in earlier in the week was met with such harsh resistance and a turn-away; the entire process was no more than some minor form fill out and a key handover. But that's another story.

Fortunately enough, the service clerk was friendly and, owing to his honorable age and self-effaced fear of computers, quite talkative while he fumbled around in menus and hit "enter" far too many times than could have possibly been necessary. We bantered about what-not, and he asked if they would be able to keep my car over the weekend; I'd already said 'yes,' but I re-iterated it with:

"I've got my girlfriend's car I'll be able to use. And speaking of, she's supposed to pick me up; where is she?"

The latter sentence seems in hindsight obviously rhetorical, but since it did come from my mouth I wouldn't count out a bias. What he said next showcased the fact that he probably didn't realize this:

"She's probably out with another guy."

"Wouldn't surprise me, but the only guy she'd be out with is our little dog!"

As I'm sure you suspected or expected, this led to:

"So what type of dog is he?"

If you're reading this, I'd place big odds you know me and therefore already know the answer, but in the case I might actually have fans, we've got a great little Pug named Frank. As serendipitous as it was, he espoused a fondness toward the breed, and then embarked on a train of thought that seriously derailed him for a spell:

"All the time my kids were growing up, we had pugs. In fact, when my I got divorced, I got the dog, because my wife didn't want her. Which is fine, ya know, she's great. Her name's Jules. When people used to ask if I missed my wife, I would to tell them that Jules reminded me a lot of her.

She snores, and she smells like an old goat."

a mountainous review

2006-01-04T01:55:00.000-08:00

From its first moments, it becomes clear that what is spoken aloud is far less important than what goes unsaid ... The Marlboro Man has reawakened as an archetype fully realized, brimming with ambivalence and complexity ... [The fiilm] exudes atmosphere; it could well be considered to be the third lead in the film ... [with a cinematographer] whose Ansel Adams-influenced backgrounds are the best travel brochure Wyoming ever had

-- mixed reviews

Preciesly. Exactly. Had I wanted to spew eloquence (and I did), this is what I'd have like to have said. And like my better half said, this will probably change the ways movies are made, so, uh... it'd probably be a good idea to check it out.

a dumber name used to be here

2005-10-02T22:34:00.000-07:00

Finally starting to become clear. Granted, clarity was a fuzzy concept at best after all this time, but the flash was starting to wear thin. Like the man across the room, pushing his way through the milky white smoke that settled in the air like dust on a table: that vacuum that followed, where the offender only existed as ephemeral wisps and contrails. 'Well dammit, at least it's something,' thought Gordon.

Of course there were legends, fables, myths... call them what you will, there is no doubt the denizen has been bellowing the siren's song since eardrums first tickled on the wind. Ancients fought wars for it, built entire ideologies against it, raised entire generations to abhor it. Yet the populace never tired in their quest to obtain, no matter what the dangers or dire consequences. But to obtain was simply cursory. To indulge: well, therein lies the uncountable, soldiers felled by their own gestalt sword.

'Millennia ago, inconsequential,' muses Gordon. The myriad of choices of travelers past no longer existed. The intolerable risk to life and limb, the unknowable unknowns: vanquished, by the miracle that is modernity. One was the solution, the panacea. Hurdles aside, what excuse held for no longer partaking?

Muddled thoughts, the path harder to see. Pivotal, must get back. Quicksand, that's the key. The cycle an old acquaintance: flash! And then, the recognized lurches drunkenly forward, sometimes days, sometimes years, in the brilliance of an instant lasting eternities. Yet Gordon remains docked, no deck crew to release the moors. Friends - as if the meaning were still truly understood - seem to draw but a single breath before they're consigned to the æther. A distant memory would be a blessing: existence negated is the norm.

So it's done, then. Decided. Gordon pushes up, balance an elusive but eventually submissive beast, and shuffles his feet toward the exit. The perpetual port-of-call no more, convinced and confident, his stance straightens, gait quickens. He'll be outside soon, the assault will strengthen. 'Failure, not this time,' ponders Gordon. Resolve is strong, it's finally clear. He walks past them, one by one, grit builds with each dodged glance. Days, weeks, months, but Gordon remains entrenched, time moves as it does for all. Friends come, and grow, yet persist in existence. More piercing stares dodged, they know: he's not buying, he's done.

The milky haze closes in, coherence of mind vanishes, replaced by the brooding coherence of smog bearing three sixty. The void-maker vanished, the void with it. Head shakes, grabs for smoky visions of faces never seen. A question haunts the dark recesses of the mind, barely audible: was it ever right? 'Did I ever know?' reflects Gordon. Flash.

when you write on the future

2005-09-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

you really must understand the present:

Even here in California, 50% of cars on the freeway are SUVs, and they're political statements: they say, we're going to take the rest of the world down with us because we don't give a damn. Essentially they're Republican vehicles: when you see an SUV go by, you know the driver voted for Bush ...

So it'll come down to another election - and with the last two elections both in their different ways perhaps having been stolen, we can't even really count on democracy anymore. It's pretty scary here ...

The current guy is worthless, probably the worst president in American history. There's a sort of stupid, small-minded meanness - a pathological assholery - to him. I think he likes doing bad things. And I think a fair amount of his base approves of that resentment - against the idea of progress, against the future, against the rest of the world ...

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, via Guardian Unlimited

(Incidently, the author of my most-favorite sci-fi novel of all time -- one of my favorite novels period -- not to mention one of the best series ever written.)

the ipod of our day

2005-09-07T17:54:00.000-07:00

One part boredom, two parts curiosity... no, make that ten parts boredom, two parts curiosity. Either way, this is what you get. Credit to Gabe Rockefeller for the original idea and much of the units-to-English translation that made this all worthwhile in the first place (we use "worthwhile" very loosely here, for obvious reasons). Tap that image to get more explanation, although it's about as un-interesting as it looks from here.

(Really, I just wanted an excuse to play with flickr, and without a digital camera the opportunity doesn't present itself that often.)

ivory towers

2005-09-01T20:25:00.000-07:00

"There ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this," Bush said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America."

"If people need water and food, we're going to do everything we can to get them water and food," Bush added. "It's very important for the citizens in all affected areas to take personal responsibility and assume a kind of a civic sense of responsibility so that the situation doesn't get out of hand, so people don't exploit the vulnerable."

-- washington post

If only Mr. Dubya were one of the recently homeless "living" in what was the poorest urban area in the country, and what is now a low-lying lake filled with pieces of what used to build a city... then maybe he'd understand. Well, maybe if he wasn't retarded in the first place, that'd help too. Because civic sense is no sweat when civilization's played rochambeau with a category five.

Update 09.02.05, direct from the "front lines":

There are many infants and elderly people among them, as well as many people who were injured jumping out of windows to escape flood water and the like -- all of them in dire straights.

Any attempt to flag down police results in being told to get away at gunpoint. Hour after hour they watch buses pass by filled with people from other areas. Tensions are very high, and there has been at least one murder and several fights. 8 or 9 dead people have been stored in a freezer in the area, and 2 of these dead people are kids.

The people are so desperate that they're doing anything they can think of to impress the authorities enough to bring some buses. These things include standing in single file lines with the eldery in front, women and children next; sweeping up the area and cleaning the windows and anything else that would show the people are not barbarians.

-- Survival of New Orleans. Heartwrenching.

American Red Cross. Donate bitches!

Update 09.06.05:

"Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)"

-- Pres. Bush, whitehouse.gov

If you're shaking your head too, it's not a joke, he really said that. Lott's house must have been so large that it didn't just turn into rubble but rubbles (and rubbles and rubbles...). That's a big mo'fucking house.

Clear as Mud

2005-07-27T21:22:00.000-07:00

Saw that comin'.

Update: well I'll be damned. Hope they all get back mud-side alright.

If it ain't broke

2005-04-13T00:40:00.000-07:00

At this point, everyone in America and probably around the world knows of the shuttle programs problems, most notably the disengration upon re-entry of Space Shuttle Columbia two years ago (farewall Columbia, shuttle astronauts are some of the very few heros the human race has left). But not as many people may know that when Discovery launches in the next couple months, a massive rescue contingency has been setup that involves launching the other of the last three remaining shuttles to attempt to save those on board.

If you read the article I linked above, you'll learn that in the event such a mission is required, the doomed ship will be allowed to fall to Earth to be destroyed in the ocean, instantly eliminating one-third of the entire fleet and effectively shutting down the shuttle program forever. As a die-hard space nerd I never thought I'd say this, but the entire program should have been scrapped decades ago.

Imagine you bought one of the most expensive, most technologically astounding cars ever made, one with millions of intricate subsystems that all needed to function in concert to keep the beast lumbering down the road. For the first five or ten years, the car would most likely run beautifully - not unlike older-model Jags (made before Ford bought the company), which were amazing cars but were so incredibley finicky and complicated they broke down at an amazing rate - but after two or three decades, even with incredible care, there would come a time where the poor thing would be so beat down and dangerous that you wouldn't dare drive it.

I realize that government money, especially at NASA these days, is tight, and I also realize that the U.S. has made quite a committment to the ISS which requires the shuttles be in operation, and I also realize that the Space Shuttle program was designed to be re-usable, but so are my contacts and eventually there comes a time where I can't see a damn thing unless I throw them out and get a new pair. Surely someone on Capitol Hill or at NASA has thought that instead of wasting millions and millions of dollars on a failing and amazingly dangerous (both physically and politically) program they could divert some of that money to the development of a modernized space vehicle that is actually modern. Don't get me wrong, I really do love the shuttle program and I have been a space dork my entire life, but the 1960s really were forty-five years ago at this point folks; it's time we started thinking about space in terms of 2005 and beyond and not in terms of the last millenium.

"Say Goodbye"

2005-03-01T01:33:00.000-08:00

Not that I remember the exact date -- I didn't even start noticing to that sort of thing until many years later -- but every time this song starts playing my consciouness slips back about a decade to when I first heard it. And I say "my consciousness slips back" because I'm not talking about a quick flashback to some minor event in your life. We're talking a "welcome to the first day of the rest of your life" type of thing.

The old man and I were scouting our prey, which had today happened to take the form of some new-fangled high-end stereo equipment. Obviously, I was just along for the ride, because my pocket book at twelve wasn't much fit for Wal Mart less the places Papa Bear frequented. And because, dammit, that's the kind of thing Dads and their sons do! Sure we could have played catch, but why do that when you can have just as much fun and continually reinforce the capitalist dogmatic ideals in your progeny! And to be completely fair, both myself and this story turn out well enough. (Well, I guess the jury's still out...)

But I digress. Ten years ago, the quaint inland town of Murrieta didn't have much in the way of electronics: well, much in the way of anything. So we lashed up our steed, took on extra supplies and munitions, and ventured forth to the great (un)known that was Escondido, the closest haven of actual civilization, if you can say that much about Escondido. The place - whose name most likely escaped me as soon as we walked out the door - was your standard skin-deep-shiny strip mall retailer of mid-range ("blue collar hi-fi") stereo crap. I liked it then, and I still do, but it's all still just crap in the end.

The overzealous sales rep was not hiding that he was having a slow day, but the result of his "fly-on-poo" level of attention was a bright purple-and-red covered album from some obscure group I'd never heard of before. The over-achiever told us that if we really wanted to test the sound quality of the system, these guys had the track to play. And he said "thee track," not "the track" so we knew he must be right. My incredible ignorance at this point nearly destroyed what turned out to be the most important musical introduction I've had to date, because I almost ran headlong into the glass sound wall when I heard a flute start playing. Good thing I held my ground... or rather, good thing that damn wall was there.

Well, it turns out I backed away from the precipice of immature lunacy just in time, because the more I heard, the more I dug. So much so that today, a whopping 1.41 gigabytes of bits are scrawled across my disks with music from Dave, and while the neutron-star-dense fog in my brain prevents me from remembering that quintessential first kiss (so sad, but true) I remember with perfect clarity the first time I heard the venerable DMB.

The truly amazing thing about really great music it accompanies you as you move from era to era in your life. Way back then, I dug the hell out of Say Goodbye because that minute-and-a-half intro was unlike anything I'd ever heard in a household of Wilson Phillips, Phil Collins and good 'ol Garth (Brooks, of course). It was only much later -- only a few years ago, in fact -- that I finally understood why the damn song was called Say Goodbye in the first place. This happened at, not surprsingly, a period of great growth and strife: the former perpetuated by the realization that I could finally relate to the lyrics I'd for years simply ignored, and the latter by the alpha and the omega of pain and strife; a woman. Say Goodbye made me realize that just because my parent's music was horrible, not all of it was, no matter how foreign it was to my punk-and-pop-drenched ears. And it did it again years later when all the crap that takes place in one's life eventually gets to the point where one must finally start to think of oneself as an "adult", and deal the new crap that goes right along with it.

At this point, I have no doubt that I'll be listening to Say Goodbye in ten years, and probably in twenty and even thirty and... well, come on, you're not a goldfish, you get it. It's not the mere fact that I'll still be enjoying the song years down the road that impresses me, it's that the song itself holds just as much promise as the future in which I'll be listening to it. That day in that glass-walled listening room, I had no conception of a time when the same melodies and harmonies would take on an entirely different meaning, just as I can't even imagine what they'll mean to me twenty years down the road.

"All we are is wasting hours until the Sun comes up, it's all ours... and tomorrow, back to being friends."

Speculative influence

2005-02-23T22:49:00.000-08:00

You know your company is doing well when... even a simple takeover rumor can take a stock that has been steadily declining and shoot it up more than 17% in a single day. We've been watching Apple climb the ladder of market power and this must be very nice confirmation for the Apple folks of that momentum, which doesn't appear to have much chance of slowing in the near future. If there was any doubt ten years ago about Steve Jobs' legacy, their shouldn't be anymore.

On code soul

2005-02-22T18:56:00.000-08:00

(This was first written on 13 April 2004, and has had a few notes added in parentheses at the end of certain paragraphs for clarity and additional information).

Soul. Singular. We're not talking about ghosts, possibly lost. We're talking about soul, as in Miles All-Your-Soul-Are-Belong-To-Us Davis soul. And MythTV (the code part). So that's a start.

You see, MythTV is sweet. Not "candy" sweet, or "flowers" sweet: Cartman sweeeeeeet (you guys). The kind of sweet you want to take home to Mom... and rail on the kitchen table. It's that sweet.

So then, what does code, soul, and MythTV have anything to do with Microsoft? Woaaaah, who mentioned Microsoft!? Must've been a Freudian slip, but I'm sure we'll be hearing more about them in a bit.

MythTV is a homebrew PVR project done by a single programmer named Issac Richards, who, from his email address, I would guess is a student. (At the time of original writing this was true, although now I would imagine there are a fair number of contributors to the project.) Most of you have probably never heard of MythTV, nay have actually used it. But those of us that have know that it's an incredible project with a great user interface that is -- from the little I've messed with commercial PVR systems -- easily comprable to Tivo or ReplayTV, save for the fact you have to be able to set it up yourself.

Where am I going with this? Well, MythTV is a product that actually does what it's users need and want it to do (very well) and yet it is, for all intents and purposes, written by one person. Not a team with eight sub-teams, one of which spends all their time working on the talking paper clip. One dude.

Now, the kid's gotta be pretty damn smart. A virtuoso, if you will, of the art of programming. And it's reflected in the project: MythTV has code soul.

As if this rave didn't make any sense so far, it's about to get even stranger. Because now is where I start talking about Star Trek: The Next Generation. I know that even admitting familiarity with ST:TNG is equivalent to dropping a 100-megaton nuke on your social life, but during my formative years I tuned in every week. Thanks a lot Dad.

You see, I'm reminded of that one episode where Data -- the almost-human android with the shiny yellow skin -- is playing music in Ten Forward (bad Star Trek joke: he's playing music in Ten Forward in about half of the episodes) and he mentions that while he can play any and every piece with perfect technical proficency, yet people consistently remark that his performance seems to lack something. Lack feeling. Lack soul.

Whether the mass market realizes it or not (they don't), programming -- really beautiful, masterful software creation -- is an art. Major software projects are, after all, the most complicated artifacts human beings have ever created: the latest Linux source code package is thirty-three megabytes (and that's heavily compressed)!

The problem with art is that there is art because of art and there is art because of money. A friend and I ranting about being forced to endure some of the most worthless commercials we had ever seen, all the while Turnpike Films has some of the most brilliant and witty commercials ever made. But you'll never see them. Because none of them ever actually make it to TV. (As of the original writing you could view Turnpike's hillarious advertisments on their website: however, due to pressure from the companies for whom they developed the spots, they're not even available online anymore. If anyone reads this and has an archive of the commericals, please contact me, I would love to have them again!)

So seriously, what the hell point am I trying to make. It all comes down to this: "bad" software is deemed so not becase it doesn't get used or it doesn't work (we need look no furthur than Windows to satisfy both these conditions). It's because, just like any other piece of artwork, we judge software against the untouchable ideal of perfect beauty, in the sense of Plato's forms.

We can "sense" if the software was written by an artist who was trying to, like so many others before him or her, finally instantiate that ethereal ideal here on Earth. We can also tell when it wasn't. When it was written by one of thousands who will never aspire to produce anything that could be called "beautiful." Software like this, software that lacks soul, is just like any other piece of "pop art:" yes, MTV's latest logo is a piece of artwork, but no one will ever wonder why it wasn't place in the Louvre. Don't agree? Then tell me why Turnpike's commercials aren't aired in every city and every market. (It's really too bad you can't watch them anymore, I'm quite disapointed.)

Microsoft can hire the entire living workforce of programmers and still never create a MythTV, or a Linux, or an OS X, or any of the other million pieces of art-in-the-machine created by dedicated programmers all over the world who do so because it's art and because they are artists. Microsoft has some of the best programmers in the world working for them, this is indisputable. And ever so rarely, one of them will gain a true artistic interest in their infinitely-small task, and the result is a piece of code that just can't have come out of a corporate cube farm: it's far too brilliant.

As a whole, and almost as a rule, art produced for any enterprise wishing to exploit it is something else entirely. It completely and utterly lacks soul, because it was produced by artisans who felt nothing for its creation. Imbibing art with soul isn't a spontaneous process, it requires raw materials. When the artist has no emotions towards what he is creating (or in Data's unfortunate case, no emotions at all) a truly soulful piece of artwork can never result.

All these mispelled words and mis-structured paragraphs to say this: art is a medium which reflects back to all who look upon it its creator, and software design is an art form just like any other. Microsoft will never be able to understand whyso many programmers spend countless hours writing software simply to write software, just like Data will never be able to play a single note the way Miles did.

here we go... again

2005-02-17T16:03:00.000-08:00

I write a lot these days. The only problem none of it's ever actually written down. I have a disorder of the motivational complex which can be very difficult to endure because there is no telling how many ground-breaking insights have been lost to the aether. Ok... I probably haven't, nor will I have ever have, a ground-breaking insight. Nevertheless, I seem to have found myself 'writing' an inummerable bunch of pages in my head these days, and if my history of 'blogging' is any indication I won't be here long, but here we go again anyway.

The fire that got my fingers to the keys was one of the those amazing structure-in-randomness epiphanies, the kind that knock you off balance for a second. I don't know if my incredible powers of ambiguity could possibly make that any less detailed, so since you already know I'm going to say that we'll get back to that later, I'll just skip over that part. (Does he mean the whole thing or... you don't know!)

If you know me, you know how attached I am to my iPod. If you don't, just know that among our friends, the group of iPod afficiandos frequently get into shouting matches with our other friends who have snapped after going days having to repeat everything thing they said two times. Most people think it's because I love the iPod itself, but that's not actually quite it. The iPod is, in fact, just a pocket-sized version of iTunes, and that's where obsession starts.

When I first got my Mac about a year ago and started using iTunes with a fair amount of reservation, my buddy Casey told me "just promise you mean you won't become one of those 'iTunes-changed-my-life' fanboys." Fortunately for me, at this point even Casey has an iPod so I can proudly admit that I'm just not going to be able to keep that promise. You see, it's not so much that iTunes has changed my life... it's just that it has completely changed the way I listen to and relate to music... music, of course, a core aspect of my personality... and day-to-day life... ... fine, you win.

Remember that big fat hook I planted way back in the second paragraph with just a tad of clever writing and a whole lot more bad grammar? Oh, you forgot about it. I guess that was bound to happen, I'm not really much good at breviety. Anyway, it had something to do with structure in chaos, so here's where I'll actually attempt to make a coherent point. Wish me luck, I'm probably gonna need it.

I use 'Smart Playlists' far more (probably 90% of the time) than the traditional, or static, playlists. I've used them for quite a while, at first because I just like how they acted almost like a relational query interface for your music, which at the time was just 'shiny and new.' But now that I've been building my playlists, and constantly tweaking the little things (sort order; what constitues 'recent' versus 'new'; how many? forty tracks, forty one tracks, forty tracks, forty two tracks, ad infinitum), I've begun to realize that iTunes begins to incorporate and reflect the musical personality, tastes and habits of it's listener.

And it was this playlist - which is actually a small chunk of a larger smart playlist - that finally made me realize it. The details (skippable unless you really care): the playlist is a 22-track selection right out of the middle of my "Recent >3s" smart playlist, defined as all the tracks that have been played in the last week who's rating is greater than three stars (">3s", I do advocate breviety in iTunes).

Since the rating system is the basis upon which I listen to music, this can be summarized as "all of the good stuff I've played in the past week." Already you can see how iTunes can be configured to act more biologically. Sorted in descending order of "last played," if you're playing directly from this list (with live updating enabled) the list even re-orders itself after each track. If you take it a step further and move back and forth between smart playlists that use similar subsets of conditions, you begin to find that one list can influence another in interesting and remarkable ways.

The point is, as I was playing this particular smart playlist, I glanced down at the next good chunk of songs to be played after the one I was currently listening to (which, by the way, was 'Smoke' by Ben Folds Five, the inspiration for the title of this blog) and realized that those tracks accuratley represented not just the music I've been listening to lately (an obviously simple effect of the conditions of the list), but they actually create something of a snapshot of who I've been in the recent past. I've come to think of it as something of a auto-generated sum-is-greater-than-the-whole mix tape for the Internet age.

They're not all tunes I would consider favorites, many of them I don't even consciously remember hearing in the past week (I could have sworn I haven't heard 'Rio' in months). No one makes mix tapes anymore, although my generation may be the last one to remember them (we didn't even make them much, we just heard them from the older cool kids), and if I actually sat down and try to put together a mix tape that was me as of late, this playlist would be it, straight up.

And of course, the novelty is that a that I can do this a week from now or a year from now and it will surprise me every time. Music is my life, so why not try to describe my life in music? That's my time, now... go watch some Family Guy or something.