Mostly, I needed to update my notes feed. You can find that feed under 'feeds' in the navbar. Mostly, I will talk about my music. If you are here for perl stuff, believe it or not, I am still making bank on my perl skills. It continues to be my favorite language (thanks to Moo and Mojolicious).

The point is, if you still follow me (and I am not sure that you should), the notes roll is going to be the thing to follow.

BTW, I still use that wordle hack I posted a while ago. It helps.

Cheers!

Five original pieces of art were commissioned for this album from the talented Michal Kváč.

The great thing about Bandcamp is you can listen to the tracks before you purchase them. When you are ready to join my cult, I mean, fan club, consider purchasing a t-shirt featuring Michal's artwork.

If you enjoy the EP, please drop me a note.

Cheers.

The usage pattern is:

wordle-solver.pl â¦er wat ulc

Also, the world list gets additional prefiltering. No words with capitals or apostrophes are considered.

#!/usr/bin/env perl use strict; use warnings; sub main { my ($pattern, $exclude, $required) = @ARGV; if (!$pattern) { die("$0 [PATTERN] [EXCLUDE] [REQUIRED]"); } if (length($pattern) != 5) { die("Pattern must be 5 characters\n"); } $exclude //= ""; $required //= ""; my @required; if ($required) { @required = split //, $required; } open my $wordsFH, "<", "/usr/share/dict/words" or die("words: $!"); NEXT_WORD: while (my $word = readline($wordsFH)) { chomp ($word); next NEXT_WORD if length($word) != 5; next NEXT_WORD if $word =~ /['A-Z]/; if ($word =~ /^$pattern$/i) { for my $r (@required) { if ($word !~ /$r/) { next NEXT_WORD; } } if ($exclude) { if ($word =~ /[$exclude]/) { next NEXT_WORD; } } print "$word\n"; } } close $wordsFH; } main();

I am thinking about making this functionality available through a web app. Drop me a note if you think this is a good idea.

Of course, this is a task for Perl

#!/usr/bin/env perl use strict; use warnings; sub main { my ($pattern, $exclude) = @ARGV; if (!$pattern) { die("$0 [PATTERN] [EXCLUDE]"); } $exclude //= ""; open my $wordsFH, "<", "/usr/share/dict/words" or die("words: $!"); while (my $word = readline($wordsFH)) { chomp ($word); next if length($word) != 5; if ($word =~ /^$pattern$/i) { if ($exclude) { if ($word =~ /[$exclude]/) { next; } } print "$word\n"; } } close $wordsFH; } main();

Give it a regex pattern to match like 'gr.at' and an optional list of letters you know are not in the solution to get back the list of possible words that fit the pattern.

No, I didn't take the fun out of this game â you did.

Jon Stewart appeared to be backing the racist, debunked idea that COVID-19 was made in a Wuhan science lab on the very first Late Show filmed in front of a full audience in more than 400 days.

On the one hand, this is just a drop in the ocean that is "people being wrong in public" problem that is the scourge of our Information Economy times. Further, to speak unpopular or even wrong ideas is (in the U.S.) a fiercely protected right. Lastly, history has shown us enumerable examples of smart people holding odious beliefs. Humans are complicated, yet we seem to pretend that they are not.

If you believe that the Chinese government manufactured COVID-19, there is little I can do change your mind. But, here is Rebecca Watson speaking about this very topic and why the consensus of virologists who have studied this pathogen do not see evidence of human manufacture.

I am old enough to know this will change almost no one's belief on this, but it is there for those with an open mind.

But this particular person espousing this particular conspiracy theory is disquieting. Stewart was, during the Bush years, a fact-checking juggernaut. Sure, he had a research staff then and yes, I was happy to hear neo-conservative propaganda trashed. But it seemed then and seems even now that Stewart is a pro-little-guy and pro-truth crusader. His decades-long work for getting benefits for 9-11 first responders is a testament to this.

Now, take that guy off the air, fire the fact-checking team and stick him on a farm for several years and you have a very ordinary rich guy free to consume media that feeds his preconceptions, just like Mike the MyPillow guy or Elon Musk or the former president. Then recall that, like all public figures, Stewart likes an audience and that "hot-takes" are the currency of the same, should we be that surprised to see him digging in on a controversial position?

I hope that Stewart's performance was a Kaufman-esque stunt. That Stewart wanted to point out the criticality of media literacy in a world where monied interests lie to the public. But I am not holding out a lot of hope for this outcome.

Much is made on the political Right of how the Left is turning into Thought Police who mandate a party line (which is an irony so rich I trust I need not point it out). As Stewart gets called out for supporting a debunked idea promulgated mostly by zealot supporters of the former president, it is important to remember the challenge of epistemology. How do we know what we know? We all have to defer to the considered, professional opinions of those technocrats who study the subjects that we do not. Do these experts get it wrong sometimes? They do, but at a much lower frequency than non-experts do. If not, then there is no reason to have experts at all. An expert opinion can be and should be challenged in good faith. But most of the time, the experts are closer to the truth than anyone else. Reality is not obliged to agree with our preconceptions or crazy ideas.

Still, this example of a dude being wrong in public hurts.

Even before the COVID-19 lockdown, my family and I enjoyed doing escape rooms. We are lucky enough to be a place with easy access to commercial escape rooms like Escapology Live Escape Games - Worldwide Escape Rooms, plus a few other smaller ones. However, we are not master puzzle breakers. Our track record for solving the puzzles is rather low. Still, the experience of doing escape rooms is so enjoyable for all involved the a string of loses, though galling, is not a deal-breaker.

We are a natural market for "board game" versions of escape rooms and we have going through at least three of the following titles: Exit: The Game, Unlock!, and Deckscape. In this post, I would like to offer my impressions of each system and its suitability to casual family gaming.

I will forego any pseudo-scientific rating system, but instead lay bare my biases. Each system has been judged by my experience playing the game with three people, one of which is a pre-teen. How well each delivered a memorable and pleasant gaming experience is my primary criterion.

One last note: my family does not play with timers. These introduce FAR TOO MUCH drama into a process that is sufficiently fraught for the players. If you too are looking for casual fun, do discard any timing device. The game ends when the last puzzle is solved or your players are uninterested in continuing.

DECKSCAPE

Deckscape, as the name suggests, is merely a deck a cards! Puzzles are both visually based (meaning you have to find hidden figures in cards), and logic based. No additional device is needed.

By far, this is the best series for casual escape room fun. No, these games will not impress you hard-core gamer friends, but they are all replayable and the stakes never feel too high. Aside from logic and math, you rarely need any outside knowledge to complete the puzzles. I only wish there were more of these!

The only drawback to this system is the lack of an in-game hint system. However, I don't find these puzzles rarely necessitate them.

Great starter titles from this series: Test Time and The Fate of London.

UNLOCK!

These games require a tablet or mobile device to play. It is possible to disable the timer for most of these games, although a few specific titles do have timed events (like Tombstone Express and The Nautilus' Traps), and I do not recommend those specifically.

My family has had the best luck with this series. There are many titles to choose from, with a variety of fantasy settings that should appeal to many. Some real-world knowledge (especially for the Arabian Nights themed title) are very helpful for solving the puzzles. This is not typically the case.

The app has a hint system, which works well. Some of the "figure out the weird device" type puzzles are less interesting to me, but I know these appeal to some (as this kind of thing is all over Interactive Fiction games).

Great starter titles from this series: The House on the Hill and The Formula.

EXIT

The Exit series has the most of titles of any of the offerings mentioned in this post. Each title has self-contained game that is card-based with additional custom "feelies" and make this series extremely popular. The system consists a riddle deck, a solutions deck, and a hints deck. There are 10 puzzles per game. Puzzles are visual, logical, spatial, and may require some crafting skills, like precision cutting and measuring. By far, this series has the most creative puzzles and the most unique puzzle solving experiences. Why is this not my favorite series?

Although we have done 3-4 of titles in Exit, we have never completed any title. We always quit before the end. Frequently, we get dead-ended in the game, where is it unclear what the puzzle is. In the last on we did, we got to a point where we need a "hidden feelies" to solve the puzzle, but we were never told by the game to obtain that. We just took the the thing anyway and moved on.

Many of the puzzles require more careful crafting of cards or feelies items than my family (or me) is interested in doing. I'm not terrible with rotating objects in my head, but I am terrible at crafting in general and worse doing so under pressure. When you are a parent, you cannot give any one task 100% of your attention, but the Exit series, which often has a lot of "game state" to manage requires this.

One last point, the production values of Exit games are very high. Each title is gorgeous. Although I find some of the puzzles rather opaque, I am inclined not to blame the game designers but my own limitations for this. I wish I could enjoy this series more.

Great starter titles from this series: The Abandoned Cabin. If you do not like this one, do not bother with the rest of the series.

Honorable Mention: Journal29

One last entry that I recommend as an excellent family activity is Journal 29, which is a book-based "escape room" or series of puzzles. The fiction of this is that a group of researchers working on a secret project have disappeared, leaving behind one last journal filled with clues to suggest the nature of their work and the reason for their disappearance. This will be very familiar to X-Files fans.

You do need an internet-enabled device to solve the puzzles, some of which require GPS look-ups, or special media files from journal29. Most of the puzzles are visual and logic based. Some may require light googling.

On the other hand, I found these puzzles incredibly approachable (4 out of some 60 utterly stumped me). Doing this puzzles with your family over the course of several sessions is very enjoyable.

I hope this helps you find the right escape room experience for your family. These games are a great way to keep your brain engaged while providing a unique (mostly non-digital) shared experience.

I will quickly confess that I do not hold my user experience or design skills in the highest regard. But I have learned enough to know how grievous many of my earlier designs are and how hard it is to produce "invisible design."

Given this professional concern, you can imagine that when I run into badly designed user interfaces outside of my job that it rather sends me around the bend.

Let's talk toasters and stoves.

I have a lovely toaster. Here is a close up of the controls on it:

Aesthetically, it is a handsome bit of sculpture. It's got that retro, Art Nouveau style that an aging, mid-century man like me enjoys. However, I have old man eyes. In the morning, when I am most likely to use the toaster, my eyes are particularly useless.

Given that, let's look at temperature controls on this unit. There are two dial controls. Dials are a fine way to translate heat intensity to a physical motion. However, look carefully at the position indicator on the dial. Do you see it? I suspect most of you can when you are looking this photo, but please note that small black dot is easily lost in the glare of the "chrome" bits of the design. Under lower light conditions (such as those common found in the morning when 100% of my breakfasts occur), it is possible to carelessly misidentify this indicator so that the control is set 180 degrees further into the "dark toast" settings that I want.

Hold that thought because I have another kitchen application with similar controls that presents similar problems.

Here are the controls for two burners on my stove top:

Again, the aesthetics of this stove is pleasing to me. It too has a mid-century modern appearance with stainless steel bits. The dial controls are arranged intuitively enough for me. Unlike the toaster, the stove designers made the dial indicator a line rather than a dot.

Since it is a gas stove, the 11 o'clock position causes a spark that sets the gas on fire. As you rotate the dial anti-clockwise past that the burner attenuates from full gas flow to its lowest setting (which is around 3 o'clock). A good amount of the time, I am cooking things with this dial at the 6 o'clock position.

When you are paying attention, these stove controls are great and easy to use. The trouble comes at the end of dinner prep when you are transition from cook to waiter. At least for me, my attention shifts away from cooking concerns after I dump the food into a service container. I am hungry and prefer my food eaten hot. Many is the time I forget, in my rush to eat, to turn off the burner, especially when the dial is in the 3 o'clock or 6 o'clock position.

When a burner is set to simmer there is hardly any flame visible. When the dial is at 6 o'clock the indicator appears similar to the off position.

Either way from my table, I cannot see the flames of the burner and the dials do not stand out.

For a long time I thought there was little to be done to help me with these problems. However, my wife is currently taking a design course. After discussing some of the challenges she was working through, it got me thinking again about my appliance UX problem. What is the core problem with the toast and stovetop controls? I submit that these controls do not offer clear enough indicators of their current state when viewed from normal, but sub-optimal positions.

Taking a page out of early rocket design, it occurred to me that painting one hemisphere of the dial control would be enormously helpful. Observe:

And also:

Now, before I get cancelled, let me assure you that this is a design idea. I am not literally going to take a highlighter and color these dials. Such a solution would cause "domestic inquietude". However, the principal of making the two hemispheres of the dial visually distinct has been used in other places to great success. In the future, I hope appliance designers consider how their controls present in less than perfect conditions.

The title of this post is a nod to the very excellent book The Design of Everyday Things by Don Normal. If this post tickled your fancy, read what a UX pro has to say about our designed world.

No persistent databases. No user accounts. No connection to outside services that may close up shop in the future. Runnel never modifies your mp3 collection at all. It never writes files outside of its own directory. It never "phones home" to tell me what people using my app are doing with it. It is just a single-threaded Mojolicious server that uses Bootstrap for styling, a small table sorting library (which I might replace), and small bits of playlist list code that manages a single MediaStream object. It works on desktop and modern mobile devices (sorry, Apple Newton users).

Like all new programs, Runnel has bugs. When they bother me enough, I fix them. I use Runnel every day to play music from my iPad or iPhone to bluetooth speakers around my house. Could the interface be better? Yup. Could it have a lot more features? Uh huh! Am I going to waste time adding those? Heck to the No.

While the tech that went into Runnel might be interesting to some (it's mostly vanilla JavaScript with modules), what this post is about is why I had to write what should have already exist in better forms somewhere on the Internet. Actually, due to discoverability problems in general (thanks to search engine dependence on sponsored ads), there may well be dozens of projects like this. But let this rant start with the large scale issues before raking any particular actor over the coals.

I started using the Internet fairly late among my peers. The first computer I bought with a modem was in 1993 or 1994 and with it, I taught myself to program in C. Back then, I also discovered Bulletin Board Systems, on which I played online DOOR games like Legend of the Red Dragon and found mountains of UFO conspiracy text files. I was living the 2020 pandemic lifestyle 30 years before y'all.

It may not be believed by younger readers of this blog (who themselves are only conjectured to exist), but simple mp3 files were A Big Deal. Until this time, high quality stereo music files only existed (for the most part) as uncompressed audio files (WAV, AIFF, etc.). A five minute song might produce a file 20 Megabytes (MB) in size. To translate that into an equivalent modern file size, that's something like 20 Gigabytes (GB) for each song. Audio CDs hold about 640 MB and contained around twelve songs without much room to spare. So exciting a technological breakthrough were mp3 files that people started "ripping" their audio CDs and sharing the resulting mp3 files. This idea literately became the core business idea for one of the early Dotcom companies called Napster.

I can imagine that if you had not heard this story before, it may strike you a pretty thin concept for a company, but please be assured that Napster was so big a deal that the entire recording industry lined up against them.

My point is that sharing mp3 was a very popular use of the Internet in the late nineties and early 2000s. Because of this there were many proprietary and open source programs designed for streaming large collections of mp3 files. I recall running a few of them back in the day.

Due to massive improvement in web technology and internet connectivity, tech companies started moving away from producing downloadable software and instead created web-based applications. Why give your grubby customers your precious code when you could just sell access to it? These companies were collectively called the "Web 2.0" and it is where things on the Internet took a bad turn.

In 2021, we find ourselves largely dependent on cloud based services (which is largely rebranded Web 2.0, but metastasized) that publish our microblogs, our spreadsheets, our photos, our music collections, and even our health as measured (questionably) by consumer electronics.

I am no luddite, but our relationship to tech has in my lifetime gone from being one where people were owners of software to one where the selling of people's personal data as obtained from nearly all uses of softwares drives a huge swath of the world economy. The richest American, Jeff Bezos, is not worth $200 billion because he sells books. Google is not one of the largest tech companies because they help you find recipes for chicken tikka masala. Facebook makes no money from keeping you in touch with your family. In each instance, these companies use your data for profit (either to drive their own advertising or to sell to third party advertisers).

OK. We are not likely to fix this trend with a blog post. But what can we do?

As consumers, we can roll the clocks back a few decades to were we run at least some of our own software. Learn to code or find code on github that meets your personal needs. Rent a virtual machine on linode or host your web site off a raspberry pi at home from your always connected internet access point. None of these solutions are as convenient as those cloud based solutions, but when enough people have the same problem, someone starts working on a solution. That's the Internet I remember and it was a far healthier place for it.

Even though I have been an agnostic atheist since adolescence, I have had many experiences with various flavors of Christianity. My mother was a believer (although her faith was decidedly not based on a reading of scripture). I read a lot of C.S. Lewis. I was baptized around the age of 10, so that it is still a memory I retain. I attended Boston College where I was taught a version of Western Philosophy that included noted Christian writers like St. Augustine. All this is to say that whether or not I would have chosen to study Christianity, I have nonetheless been steeping in it for decades.

To be completely candid, I am somewhat hostile towards this faith. Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say. What wisdom age has brought me suggests it is not religion that greatly affects people's behavior and attitudes. People do what they want and justify their actions with whatever fiction is most convenient for them to do so. However, some truly contemptible behaviors have used the cloak of random Biblical passages as absolution and vindication for actions no religion on Earth sanctions. How religion conned the world into believing that only a faith could foster ethics and morality is a feat of advertising well worth studying. History has always been a more reliable (if descriptivist) teacher of human behavior.

A few years ago, I heard an interview Bart Ehrman on Fresh Air. He was promoting his book /Misquoting Jesus/. Something about this topic clicked with me. As I have indicated, I was no stranger to theologians, but few of them were atheists. The best analogy for Ehrman is that he does for historical-critical New Testament studies what Carl Sagan did for space science, which is to say Ehrman brings the consensus view of his discipline to a lay audience. I will admit to being a bit of a fan boy of his (I joined his blog twice), which I have never considered doing for technical blogs). To date, I have read one other Ehrman book, /Jesus Interrupted/, but I expect I will read his Heaven and Hell book at some point. This fall, I found another NT scholar author I enjoy, Mark Goodacre, whose primer, /The Synoptic Problem: A Way Through the Maze/, was a clarifying treatise on why scholars believe in a lost NT source called Q and why other scholars (rightly, it seems to me) find this hypothesis untenable.

As in all academic fields, there are heterodox views of NT study and youtube is the place to find those in abundance. One of my favorite speakers on the subject is Robert M. Price (also a Lovecraft scholar). Price represents the notion that there was no actual historical Jesus and that the cult fabricated him out of similar well-known regional myths. This idea is called Mythicism and has been soundly rejected by the academic consensus.

While I find a lot of what Price and his fellow mythicists say attractive, I do not find this line of thinking compelling or productive. Mythicism is a "just-so" story that fails to account for historical evidence of Jesus found in Biblical and other contemporaneous documents. Mythicism also fails the "sniff test." Just looking at the three synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke), all of which were written after Jesus' death by different authors, none of whom actually knew Jesus personally, there are points of agreement about who Jesus was and what he did. More interestingly, there are incidents in these gospels that no writer trying to make converts would make up. These "difficult reading" passages include a story about the family of a young Jesus concerned that he was crazy (which would be a totally normal human conclusion a mother would have to a son that starts spouting off apocalyptic, Jewish fundamentalist sermons in the street!). The historicity of Jesus is a settled question in NT academia. As a starting point for understanding what the consensus view has to offer, it is more convenient to accept this point than to fruitlessly debate it.

NT studies include trying to reconstruct how an obscure Jewish apocalyptic street preacher from a small rural village in Judea grew into an organization that dominated (and often decided) the lives of millions of people across the globe. Understanding this process is not an act of faith, but a duty of the intellectually curious. Regardless of my personal animosity toward the faith, to ignore Christianity's impact is disingenuous.

Of course, there are theological questions that NT studies bumps into. One of the more curious and fundamental questions occurs fairly early in the readings of the gospels and the letters of Paul (the earliest post-Jesus proselytizer we have records of). The faith promises some kind of salvation (the exact nature of which is beyond the scope of this post) to those who believe. What exactly is it that the faithful should believe? If you look the gospel of Mark (believed to be the earliest gospel), Jesus wants his audience to be more faithful to the Jewish law than the Pharisees. This is a call to a kind of strict fundamentalism that is no longer a part of mainstream Christianity, yet it is canonically a part of the NT. Paul argues that the Jewish law should not apply to recent Gentile converts and salvation was based entirely on the belief that Jesus was bodily resurrected by God. This question of faith does not get settled in the NT, which again is a curious historical oddity.

In case you did not know, the New Testament is a collection of 27 books ("three [like the Trinity] to the third power; it's a miracle" as Ehrman often quips) all written some years after the death of Jesus. For some of these books, we believe we know who the author was. The first seven letters of Paul are believed to be written by the apostle Paul, for example. Other letters attributed to Paul in the NT are not believed by scholars to have been authored by him. All of the Gospels are anonymously authored. The names given to them are the work of later compilers. The gospels were not the first books of Christianity, but work of later first century AD Greek-speaking Christians trying to create a narrative of Jesus from oral traditions and perhaps written sources no longer available to modern scholars. There is an apocalypse, which was a style of book that contains criticisms of contemporaneous life dressed into mystically language). We know that the author of this book was named John, but this is not the same John who wrote the gospel. The rest of the NT consists of letters from the "apostolic fathers" (early church leaders) in which the doctrines of Christianity were being worked out. That is to say, the letters are the beginning of doctrinal thinking and not completely worked-out policy statements. Remember this point when someone starts citing Scripture at you to justify their personal biases.

Aside from looking at all the places where NT sources contradict each other (which is a lot of fun), learning about the struggles of the young church has softened my views towards (most) Christians.

Understanding the context in which the books of the NT were written and why they were written humanizes Christianity. Christianity becomes an evolving project of centuries guided by human minds trying to understand human suffering, mortality, and how to address both.

Faith that claims to have all the answers remains anathema to me. Faith that encourages questions is one I can live with. Ultimately, I remain disinclined towards magical thinking.

Rather than admit defeat, the incumbent appears to be staffing up the Defense Department with loyalists, to what purpose I will not speculate here. The supporters of the incumbent continue to make wild accusations and carry on as if the results of the election are in doubt. According to the states that ran them, they (modulo a mandatory recount in George) are not.

Republican senators are "indulging" (their word, not mine) the wild behavior of the president because they also believe he has lost the election. All have so far declined to publicly condemn the the darker implications of incumbent's legal and administrative maneuvers, much to their shame.

The incumbent's base is angry and being whipped into a froth with tales of a stolen election (which failed to retake the all important Senate). The Secretary of State has said he is planning for the second term of the incumbent's presidency.

None of this normal, but that does not mean that it will not end with the installment of a new president, which appears to be the mostly likely case.

That half the country appears to so little value the democratic system of government is alarming and lachrymose. The challenge of the next administration is nothing short of proving the value of our system of government to these people.

My fears are in a civil war with my rational mind. We are in unknown and novel waters.

#!/usr/bin/env perl use strict; use warnings; # https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=136266#p136266 main(); sub main { if ( $> != 0 ) { die( "Must run as root\n" ); } unset_led0_mode(); unset_led1_mode(); for ( 1 .. 3 ) { led0_on(); print STDOUT "on\n"; led1_off(); sleep 1; led0_off(); led1_on(); print STDOUT "off\n"; sleep 2; } reset_default_led0_mode(); reset_default_led1_mode(); } sub set_led_trigger_mode { my ( $led, $mode ) = @_; $led //= 'led0'; do { local $|; open( my $out, '>', '/sys/class/leds/$led/trigger' ) || warn( $! ); select $out; $|++; print $out $mode; close $out; }; } sub unset_led0_mode { set_led_trigger_mode( 'led0', 'none' ); } sub unset_led1_mode { set_led_trigger_mode( 'led1', 'node' ); } sub reset_default_led0_mode { set_led_trigger_mode( 'led0', 'mmc0' ); } sub reset_default_led1_mode { set_led_trigger_mode( 'led1', 'default-on' ); } sub change_led { my ( $led, $state ) = @_; $led //= 'led0'; $state = $state ? 1 : 0; do { local $|; open( my $out, '>', '/sys/class/leds/$led/brightness' ) || warn( $! ); select $out; $|++; printf $out "%d\n", $state; close $out; }; } sub led0_on { change_led( 'led0', 1 ); } sub led0_off { change_led( 'led0', 0 ); } sub led1_on { change_led( 'led1', 1 ); } sub led1_off { change_led( 'led1', 0 ); }

Turn Off Retweets

Your timeline in Twitter will be filled with posts from the accounts you follow, as you might expect. However, twitter will also add to your timeline posts that your followers retweeted. I and others have observed that the most outrage-producing content are the ones most likely to be retweeted. This is done, most often, as a sign of support for the position promulgated by said post.

There are at least two additional problems with retweets.

The first is that since it is so easy to retweet a post, the retweeter often does not careful vet the veracity of claims made by the original poster. I can tell you first-hand that retweeting is often done for emotional reasons rather than rational ones. Retweets are the kind of content that makes Twitter terrible. Worse still is that you will be tempted to reshare the retweet and spread the virus further. Wear a mask, er, decline retweets in your timeline.

The second problem with retweets is that usually the reason you are following an account is to see original content. It takes (marginally) more effort to write a tweet than to repost. If you are following smart, diligent people, you will find the original posts of same a lot more interesting, nuanced, and considered. This is the content you should be paying attention to on Twitter.

Twitter knows that retweets prolong engagement with their platform, so disabling them is labor-intensive. Retweets must be disabled per-account. You will need to visit the account page of each of your followers. Near the top of that page (near the name and profile stuff) on the right hand side, are three vertical dots. Click on this to see a set of options, including Turn-off Retweets.

Because this is so painful to do, I suggest first stopping retweets from the accounts that spam you with the most rage-inducing content. Do this for maybe 5 - 10 accounts per day. After even a couple of days, you will find that the fire in your timeline is much reduced. The quality content will start to jump out at you.

There may be a few accounts whose retweets you want to see. Great! These posts will be welcome additions in your timeline and not get lost among noise.

Decline Resharing of Likes

Another way Twitter "helps" your timeline is to occasionally insert posts that your followers merely liked. As with retweeting, "liking" a tweet is a low-quality, intellectually cheap action that is a poor indicator of quality. For example, I like posts all day long that I would not even retweet! Why would anyone care to see the results of my compulsive clicking?

To turn off this behavior in Twitter, find a post in your timeline that Twitter inserted because some of your followers "liked" it. There is an inverted caret on the top right corner. Click that to see more options. One of those options will be "See less often".

Set Your Timeline to Chronological Order

Twitter has some bogus algorithm it uses to order the posts in your timeline. This algorithm was not designed for your benefit but theirs. You can change the order that posts appear in your timeline to chronological by clicking on the set of stars at the top of your timeline. Change from "see Top Tweets first" to "Tweets as they happen" (or wording to that effect).

Chronological ordering at least grounds you in conversations that are contemporaneous. With top tweets, you could be responding to a post from a few days again, keeping a tedious thread alive longer than it needed to be. If an older post is worth seeing, you will often find it referred to by your friends or others.

Use Muted Words and Muted Accounts

This feature was long-overdue in coming to the platform. Twitter allows you to define a set of words and phrases that will cause posts to be hidden in your timeline and replies. This is a glorious feature that you should invest time crafting. I have a whole passel of politicians, pundits, and attention-seeking knuckleheads in my account's list. Is this an information bubble? Sure, it is, just like a space suit is an air bubble for astronauts. Not all bubbles are bad.

Sometimes, you want to follow a user, but you do not want to see their posts often. This sounds weird, but the situation happens. For example, I jabber about politics a lot around election time. Some (all?) of my followers do not care to hear my wisdom on the subject. They may choose to mute me for some months until the fever has passed.

Muting an account is like putting someone on probation. It's not as final as unfollowing, but that can often be the next step should posts not improve.

Block Accounts Early and Without Concern

Finally, Twitter allows you to block accounts of people with whom you wish no further interactions. I have about 100 accounts blocked, most of whom seem to want to argue with me. I do not argue with people on the Internet, since I am a professional Internet user.

Some people fell bad or nervous about blocking accounts. Do not. It is your right to control access to you. If someone even appears to be trouble for you personally, just block them. I have been blocked by comedian Paul F. Thomkins at least twice, although I am not entirely sure why. But the beauty of blocking is that Thomkins has never needed to explain why he did this. Neither will you.

To hijack a sloppy, sentimental expression, "block as if no one is watching."

In Conclusion

I hope you find this tips helpful. Many of them are already well known to long-time Tweeters. Note that some third-party Twitter clients may have even more ways to improve the quality of your timeline, so take the time to learn them.

Many of us spend far too much time on Twitter. I have been on the platform since 2009. Take control of your timeline or someone else will.

For the moment, let's grant that you need to deploy an application in docker containers. Perhaps you need several instances of parts of the application (like frontend UI that talks to centralized catalog DB and authentication directory). I get using some kind of orchestrating software that copies docker containers onto the right VMs when new versions of the container are made available. There are a couple of deployment packages with long histories that can do this now.

What irks me about k8 is the way it also becomes an application level router, needed to manage DNS records and load balance. This mixing of release management and production dependency seems entirely wrong-headed.

While I was grant that some very large applications might need this level of abstraction, too much containerization during development has got to be an anti-pattern.

There is no way to fully express the totality of excitement shared by my friends and I around this title at the time it was published. In pre-Internet days, role playing supplements like this were a lifeline to kids stuck in places designed to be boring.

Right now, in 2020, it is not difficult to understand that some of the foundational texts of youth have been criticized for colonialism, racism or at least cultural appropriation. To state the obvious, the original authors of Dungeons and Dragons, E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, were a pair of middle-aged, middle class, mid-century white dudes from Wisconsin. In other words, two people marinated in the weird white supremacist, cold war culture of twentieth century America (a stew in which I too was basted). To their credit, each was drawn to medieval wargaming as a tacit rejection of their culture in which they found themselves. Unfortunately, it was difficult to completely isolate oneself from the myriad of subtle racist messaging that saturated all popular media of the time, as I later learned.

I grew up (and currently live) in the venerable Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Although considered by outsiders to be a bastion of enlightened liberalism, such perception does not long survive contact with the ground truth of living here. While it is not the hotbed of racism to rival certain infamous Southern states, it is far from devoid of it. As a kid, overt racism was actively and decidedly squashed. Yes, you could like the General Lee but saying that you wanted to bring back slavery was at least going to get you disinvited to cocktails at the boat house. Still, when I watched TV shows or the nightly news, invariably the villains would be people of color, even if this was not explicitly pointed out. There was vocal endorsement for the civil rights movement of the 60s and even lionizing of Dr. King, but the car doors still were pointed locked when we drove through Harlem in NYC. We had what might be termed proximity xenophobia. This is a fear of people with whom you did not grow up. The dread appears to increase with the distance of the origin of such strangers from your home. Which is to say that even white folks from other parts of the country were cautiously handled. I perceived this mode of thinking to be a wide-spread default of central Massachusetts culture, but I can present no scientifically-vetted data to support this assertion.

Xenophobia is often the mother of racism, but they are not the same. Racism comes with a whole passel of intellectual gymnastics needed to justify the belief that one group of people should actively oppress another due to some imagined genetic or divinely created inequality. These justifications are encoded into laws and business practices, creating systemic misery for the target group. I recommend the company of neither, but forced to choose, I prefer the xenophobes. It is easier to educate a xenophobe than a racist, since "curing" racism entails pulling down disingenuous arguments about "race" and getting the frightened white person to accept the existence of their privilege (also see white frigility, which is another condition under which I labor).

An additional feature of my xenophobia relevant to rearing was my mother's fascination with all things Asian (best read here as Chinese and Japanese art and furniture). She was born in 1935 in the Bay State and had a less than halcyon childhood. No doubt that the exotic artifacts from Pacific Rim that would later fill first her home and, after she passed, mine made a strong impression on her. These might as well have been dropped from outer space, as she had no practical access to people from that region and little time for research in a library (although she worked in both my elementary school's library and that of my other primary school, Cape Cod Academy).

My parents both actively tried to fight against the cultural programming that each had received from the 1940s, in which xenophobia was considered obviously patriotic. Terrible ideas from one's childhood often sink into pre-conscious thinking where they are hidden from notice and are difficult to uproot later.

This pattern so dependably reproduces that with some schadenfreude, I will enjoy watching the more strident younger voices of today who righteously call out on social media the micro-aggressions of their elders today find themselves targeted by similar opprobrium in 10 - 15 years time [and laugh at the predictable reactionary calls to stop this new "cancel culture" from same].

To hijack a line from the CRPG Fallout: Culture War, culture war never changes.

The fascination with (even fetishization of) Asian culture by Western people is called Orientalism. In the US specifically, there is a bizarre mirror sympathy that romanticizes a fantasy version of antebellum black slave culture called Black Americana, which takes the form of monstrous kitchen and lawn decorations (links intentionally omitted). From Orientalism by Edward Said:

"Orientalism depends for its strategy on a flexible (Western) positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand."

â Orientalism

These forms of Othering often go unchecked since their devotees express no desire to destroy or harm the objects of their ideation. Yet these fantasies strip the humanity away from their target cultures, leaving one dimensional "magical creatures" in their place. This is a fetish of a dominate culture over politically and economically weaker ones in a given nation. If told that a significant portion of the young Chinese population romanticized a cartoonish version of American cowboys or even the dreadfully dull Puritans, I would not be surprised.

Enter the ninja.

The 1980s were a triumph of Japanese culture in the U.S. Having dug out of the atomic ruins of WWII, Japan had built a formidable economy based on durable goods, like automobiles, and consumer electronics. Wealth flooded into the land of the Rising Sun allowing for a resurgence in culture and arts. The amazing movies by Japanese auteurs like Arika Kurosawa influenced Western movie directors. By the 80s, Japan looked like the land of the future. While the 60s and 70s brought the delight of primarily Chinese martial arts films to the West, the 80s saw Western marketers package the concept of ninjas and samurais for the white adolescent market (of which I was one).

Make no mistake. Ninjas were the bomb.

Dressed in silken black garments, armed with the straight bladed ninjato, throwing stars, and climbing claws called shukos, these stealthy medieval assassins fit perfectly with Cold War culture of high stakes espionage. Popularized in movies, TV, comic books, and all possible media, the feats and abilities of ninja were stories that grew in the telling. Could they blend into shadows? Of course! Could they stop their heart beats? Naturally!

The flip side of this narrative coin were the samurai: noble, aristocratic warriors following the Bushido codes of honor. Wielding master-crafted katana swords and donning brightly colored armor, the Samurai of 80s conceit where natural opponents of ninjas. Guided by their strict moral code, they operated alone without magical powers or totems, forever on watch against the anarchic, semi-magical, evil ninja.

Or something like that.

Of course, the real history of ninjas and samurai is far messier. Samurai were very much like feudal knights in Europe, requiring sponsorship from a powerful Daimyo, or land owner. Daimyos frequently strove for political power against one another, relying on the martial skills of their samurai to win the day. Later samurai began to wield political power themselves. Into this highly fraught feudal system arose a need for saboteurs, spies, and assassins. The ninja catered to all these roles of irregular warfare. The heyday of ninjas was the 16th - 17th century. However over the centuries, samurai became seen as bloated aristocratic parasites. While this story fits well into a Marxist analysis of medieval class struggles, but that's not what you can sell to kids.

In 1985, TSR published an AD&D rulebook that adapted the historical figures of ninjas and samurai into a fantasy setting informed by primarily Japanese mythology. This rulebook, as you probably gathered, was called Oriental Adventures and it sold well. TSR was in financial trouble when this supplement was published. This one title helped pull them out of that crisis.

Written in large part by Gygax, the book is a high watermark for RPG supplements. To those ignorant of medieval Pacific Rim history, OA presents an fascinating world of magic, honor, and adventure. In pre-commercial Internet days, OA opened a new world to young Western minds, including my own. To quote from the preface of OA:

"Of course, schools of fighting are covered. So are the differences in weapons between China, Japan, and so on. Culture is also stressed. Honor, dignity, training in social graces and ceremonies are as important to the adventures in this milieu as are experience points and magical treasure. Think about that for a moment."

â Oriental Adventures, preface

It's hard to know the intentions of the authors, but in this passage, Gygax demonstrates that the Pacific Rim is not a monoculture. While not being a historical-sociological text book, the ruleset attempts to present a blended culture that would be significantly alien to many of its readers.

OA is a work of fiction that explicitly calls itself fantasy and it no way implores the reader to believe that what it is describing represents any real human beings alive or dead. However, in the absence of readily available factual content or access to flesh and blood Japanese, Chinese, or Korean people, these fantasies can and did inform Western views and trade on Western stereotypes. Recall that OA appears in a culture that is already white supremacist generally and within the subset of people already enthralled with Orientalism.

Can it really be controversial to call OA an work of Orientalism? Surely, it is the very definition of it.

"In art history, literature and cultural studies, Orientalism is the imitation or depiction of aspects in the Eastern world. These depictions are usually done by writers, designers, and artists from the West."

â Wikipedia

OA is the work of someone in love with an idea of feudal Japan who was not overly concerned with the danger of stereotyping. To address the elephant in the room, the word "oriental" (meaning Eastern) has become a lot more of a taboo word than it was when in 1980. However, language adapts to culture. By the nineties, I was rightly called out of use of this word with respect to people. However, I recall no incidents of condemnation using this word during the 70s or 80s. In this case, the word is too broad and frankly too dismissive to have any real use anyway. When (if?) you read the Edwardian Yellow Peril thriller The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu the modern reader may find it odd / repulsive / illogical that cultures as different as those of India, China, and the Philipeans are all lumped together. Take some hope from your reaction that the long arc of history is bending toward social justice.

Perhaps Fu Manchu and OA are not so different after all. Published 60 years apart from each other, both sought to exploit the culture of real people for the benefit of an imperialist market. But that 60 year difference also brought huge changes in technology that made it far easier to learn about the history of real Pacific Rim cultures. When Sax Rohmer was writing about "chinamen," he had precious few reliable literary or real world references to use, cosseted as he was smog-blighted London. He could have easily shifted subject of his stories to aliens from Venus and been decades ahead of the X-Files. Dr. Fu Manchu is one of the world's most fascinating villains who works only in the matrix of profound xenophobia and cultural ignorance. From that perspective, OA is far more humanizing and respectful of the culture it presents. That, obviously, is a low hurdle to clear.

What is good about OA is the way it communicates a sense of wonder and a sense of the exotic. Imaginations need these things. The easiest way authors create verisimilitude in their fantasies is to borrow from real history, which is a trick TSR used far too much and far too casually. The challenge for fantasy writers going forward is to be inspired by the profound diversity of human cultures, but also to synthesize the source material to create worlds that more than just thinly-rethemed analogs. A good example of this hard work can be see in M. A. R. Baker's Empire of the Petal Throne.

At the end of the day, I cannot muster full-throated opprobrium towards OA. The work is filled with love, not malice. However, the queasy feeling induced by the title alone prevents me from giving this work a pass (and the clear orientalism within is problematic). The core conflict that galls me is that all kids from all ethnicities should be allowed to have heroic fantasies, whether the setting for those adventures is European, Asiatic, African, or American. The are so few heroes in real life. Role playing can promote empathy for our fellow Earthlings and a deeper understanding cultures. Of course, it can also induce false ideations that are dehumanizing.

I have to come down in the side supporting of limitless fantasy. An active, engaged mind is better for society than the opposite. And if occasionally this produces some well-intentioned othering, that is a small price to pay (and a consequence that I trust is straight-forward to fix with education).

If somehow OA were responsible for producing iconography like that Black Americana, I would be profoundly angry at the work. Is the absence of such real-world manifestations of ignorance and oppression all that saves this publication for me?

There is no particular order to this list. I watch all of these channels myself even without my son.

• Curious Droid: Mostly about historical aeronautics, but every episode is great. And dig Paul Shillito's crazy shirts!
• Crash Course: Crash Course is a production of John and Hank Green and covers the gamut of liberal arts subject, but there is a lot of science and engineering to be found here. Great introductions to complicated topics that never talk down to the viewer.
• Kurzgesagt: Come for the content, stay for the animations. It's science explained with an opinion. Some episodes, like Is Meat Bad?, will make you groan. Still, I have watched every episode and look forward to more.
• SciShow: The second of the Vlog Brothers channels on this list, SciShow is another channel of which I try to watch every episode. All are short nuggets of information about what's going on with science today
• CPG Grey: Fast talking stick figures drop tons of esoteric knowledge you didn't know you needed. How to become Pope? What does the US-Canada look like and why? What a field trip to a decommissioned missile testing range? Grey makes all of these intellectual inquiries charming.
• Science Asylum: If you can't trust a guy named Nick Lucid to explain physics, you have a lot of trust issues, bro. In particular, Lucid's scale model of the solar system should help your child understand stellar distances of our local solar system.
• Dr. Becky: Astrophysicist from Oxford, Dr. Smethurst breaks down some of the complexity of astronomy today. If you are not already excited about what's going on with astronomy today, hold on to your hat.
• FermiLab: From the famous particle science research center FermiLab, Dr. Don Lincoln does deep dives into topics like quantum physics, fusion, and just about anything else needed to write a good sci-fi story. Check this channel out.
• Khan Academy: The most explicitly pedagogical of all the channels listed here, Khan Academy tends to explore math basics, algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and even some calculus. Great content for those new to the subjects or those needed a gentle reminder.

In a perfect world, all of these creators would be supported by public funds for each provides extraordinary public benefit. However, just watching these videos and subscribing to their channels does benefit the creators and helps YouTube's AI find similar content for you.

As a professional full-stack web developer, taskboy.com has often been my playground to experiment with new ideas. It is now primarily a "resume" site with an attached blog.

Much of my professional work involves creating database-driven Model-View-Controller, n-tiered web applications for my employer's intranet. Which is why I have gone in exactly the opposite direction with taskboy.com, a site that features mostly static pages. The site is hosted on a debian virtual machine provided by Linode, with whom I have done business for the past decade without complaint. The web content is served by the venerable httpd server from the Apache foundation, which is still provides rock-solid performance along with a bounty of optional modules. I have a very simple apache configuration for taskboy.com (although there are other virtual hosts on the system as well).

Service Architecture

Just because the blog posts are static does not mean that I craft the HTML for each post by hand. Instead, I use a hacked version of Jason McIntosh's Plerd system to produce all the web content accessible through the blog site. Plerd watches a directory for new markdown files. When it sees them, it translates the markdown to HTML, wraps that HTML in existing HTML templates and writes the file to the docroot directory that apache serves to you when you access https://www.taskboy.com/. Plerd takes care of creating various Atom and JavaScript feeds for me.

Here's my attempt to describe the blog, notes, and image publishing architecture of taskboy.com:

I use a customized version of Plerd. I made some modifications to the internal structures of Plerd, because jmac's version regenerates the entire site when it discovers new content. My version of Plerd rewrites only what it must (using a file system-based data store to maintain state) . I moved other bits of the software around for personal aesthetics. Also, I wanted my CSS and JS to be generated from Plerd templates along with blog content. This makes retheming the site very easy. Finally, I wanted to get rid of the plerdall daemon. This is the service that watches for directory changes. Instead, I have a cron that fires off plerdcmd (my own executable available in the forked project) that does much the same thing. Running out of cron just makes maintenance easier for me. I do not need to worry about restarting things when the machine reboots.

Another change was to make the client-side experience more dynamic. Because pages are regenerated only when needed, things like the recent posts side bar need to be generated when the page loads. Luckily, there was already a feed for the recent posts, so a little JS glue was need to insert that into the side bar.

It turns out that having JSON feeds actually powers quite a bit of Plerd. By "JSON Feed", I mean static JSON files accessible through a URL.

It is no secret that I have grown unhappy with the business models of social media. Being a greybeard, I remember when publishing on the web meant finding a public server, standing up a web server, and writing content for it. After about 10 years of messing with large social media sites, I realized I wanted to own my content again. Turns out, the folks at indieweb feel the same way.

Plerd already had many hooks ready for indieweb, but I wanted to understand it all better, which means experimenting with it myself.

Creating a static blog generator is not a new idea, even for me, who used perl and HTML::Mason to do this last time in the early aughties. However, Plerd has added a certain rigor to the process that was lacking before.

The frontend static of taskboy is built on Bootstrap, which I have gotten to know well because I have used it professionally for years now. Although Bootstrap requires jQuery, I am weaning off of that venerable shim library since modern EMCAScript has become widely adapted, capable and (mostly) sane. As I have mentioned in a previous post, I prefer to use JavaScript sparingly to enhance the user experience of the content rather than be a requirement to see any content on the site (although the sidebar of my blog does depend on, that is fairly optional content).

Authoring with Bear

What has really gotten me excited about blogging again is mobile devices. Sure, tablets and smartphones have been around for 10+ years now and laptops are Paleolithic atavisms, but found that I was quite happy to tweet on them for 10+ years. What changed? Two things.

First, I got really grumpy with Facebook's inability to control their own worst instincts about spying on me. In 2018, I deleted my account. In 2020, I felt like Twitter had become a company I worked for without being paid to do so.

Second, I discovered a text editor app for iOS that I really, really like called Bear. It's not a programmer's text editor, but it is a markdown-first text editor. It is easy to use, well-integrated with Dropbox, and pretty. When coupled with a decently sized bluetooth keyboard, it is actually quite pleasant to compose long documents like this!

Syncing to taskboy.com

Dropbox continues to support linux command line clients. This is perfect for my use-case. All my authoring platforms also support Dropbox.

When I am ready, I export my document from Bear to the right folder in Dropbox.

Handling pictures is easier than it has ever been, but that is mostly thanks to Dropbox, which is the hero of this story.

To publish pictures, I save photos to a directory on Dropbox. On taskboy, a periodically recurring process (aka cron) copies (actually rsyncs) all pictures there into the "img" directory of my docroot. Dead simple and crazy reliable.

Heck, here is the crontab entry:

*_60 * * * * rsync -ua $HOME_Dropbox_plerd_images/ $HOME_sites_www_www_img/

(Forgive the weirdly redundant */60. I was working around a small Bear issue.)

Publishing

It's only slightly more involved to publish blog posts and notes. To do so, I run this:

plerdcmd -P

This looks in two Dropbox folders. One folder contains blog posts as markdown files that need to be converted to HTML files. The other contains text files that will become notes. Either way, plerd writes the HTML files into the docroot. This runs every 3 minutes, so as not to encourage me not to spam readers. It also allows me a little window to catch typos.

Recently, I decided that I want to publish my notes to Twitter. I have written Twitter clients in the past, so that part wasn't hard. The program I wrote consumes the javascript feed of notes published by plerd and posts new notes to tweeter. It remembers what it already has published so as not to spam Twitter (hopefully).

Here is the mildly expurgated source code:

use Modern::Perl '2017'; use DBI; use Digest::MD5 'md5_hex'; use Getopt::Long; use HTML::Strip; use JSON; use Path::Class::File; use POSIX 'strftime'; use Twitter::API; our $gDBH; main(); sub usage { return \$opts{feedFile}, 'l|limit=i' => \$opts{limit}, 'q|query=s' => \$opts{query}, 'u|user=s' => \$opts{user}, 'v|verbose' => \$opts{verbose}, 'h|help' => \$opts{usage} ); if ($opts{usage}) { say usage(); exit; } dbValidate($opts{verbose}); if ($opts{query}) { return doQuery($opts{query}); } my ($twitter, $tokens) = getTwitterHandle($opts{user} || $ENV{USER}, $opts{verbose}); if (!defined $tokens) { die("Internal error [token recall failed]: rerun program."); } if ($opts{feedFile}) { if (!-e $opts{feedFile}) { die("Cannot find $opts{feedFile}\n"); } doPostsFromFeed($twitter, $tokens, $opts{feedFile}, $opts{limit}, $opts{verbose}); } } sub getTwitterHandle { my ($user, $verbose) = @_; my $client = Twitter::API->new_with_traits( traits => 'Enchilada', access_key => 'secret', access_secret => 'secret', consumer_key => "I've got a", consumer_secret => 'secret', ); my ($token_hash) = recallUserAccessTokens($user); if ($token_hash) { # This fatals if broken say "Testing cached user tokens" if $verbose; eval { $client->verify_credentials( { '-token' => $token_hash->{token}, '-token_secret' => $token_hash->{secret}, } ); 1; } or do { forgetUserAccessTokens($user); warn($@); say "These credenials no longer work. Please run $0 again."; exit; }; if ($verbose) { say "Cached access tokens for $user appear to be valid"; } return ($client, $token_hash); } say "Getting request token" if $verbose; my $request = $client->oauth_request_token; say "Getting auth URL" if $verbose; my $auth_url = $client->oauth_authorization_url({ oauth_token => $request->{oauth_token}, }); print "Authorize this application at: $auth_url\nThen, enter the returned PIN number displayed in the browser: "; my $pin = ; # wait for input chomp $pin; say ""; say "Getting access tokens for $user" if $verbose; my $access = $client->oauth_access_token( { token => $request->{oauth_token}, token_secret => $request->{oauth_token_secret}, verifier => $pin, } ); my ($token, $secret) = ($access->{'oauth_token'}, $access->{'oauth_token_secret'}); if (!($token && $secret)) { die("Did not get complete set of auth tokens for user $user. Rerun.\n"); } say "Recording access tokens" if $verbose; recordUserAccessTokens($user, $token, $secret); return ($client, recallUserAccessTokens($user)); } sub doQuery { my ($table) = @_; if ($table eq 'tokens') { return reportAccessTokens(); } elsif ($table eq 'publications') { return reportPublications(); } else { die("Unknown table '$table'"); } } sub doPostsFromFeed { my ($twitter, $tokens, $feedFile, $limit, $verbose) = @_; my $feed = JSON::from_json(Path::Class::File->new($feedFile)->slurp()); my $published = 0; for my $item (reverse @{ $feed->{items} }) { my $cleanedContent = cleanContentForTwitter($item); if ($verbose) { say "Post will be:\nâ\n$cleanedContent\nâ"; } my $pub = recallPublication(\$item->{content_html}); if ($pub) { if ($verbose) { say "Already published this. Skipping"; } next; } else { eval { my $response = $twitter->update( $cleanedContent, { -token => $tokens->{token}, -token_secret => $tokens->{secret}, } ); 1; } or do { say $@; next; }; recordPublication($tokens->{username}, $item->{content_html}); $published += 1; if (defined $limit && $published >= $limit) { if ($verbose) { say "Published the maximum number ($limit) of posts to Twitter."; } last; } } } return 1; } sub cleanContentForTwitter { my ($feedItem) = @_; my $continuation = "â¦"; my ($noteUrl, $content) = ($feedItem->{url}, $feedItem->{content_html}); $content = HTML::Strip->new->parse($content); my @words = split(/ /, $content); return if !@words; my $linkBack = "\n\nLink: $noteUrl"; my $maxLen = 280 - length($linkBack); my $cleaned = ""; while (@words) { my $word = shift @words; my $proposed = $cleaned . "$word "; if (length($proposed) > $maxLen) { if (@words) { $cleaned = $cleaned . "$word$continuation"; } last; } $cleaned = $proposed; } $cleaned .= $linkBack; return $cleaned; } sub recordUserAccessTokens { my ($user, $token, $secret) = @_; return if !($user && $token && $secret); my $db = dbConnect(); my $now = time(); my $result = $db->selectall_arrayref("SELECT 1 FROM tokens WHERE username=" . $db->quote($user)); if ($result->[0]->[0]) { my $sql = "UPDATE tokens SET token=?, secret=?, updated_at=? WHERE username=?"; my $sth = $db->prepare($sql); return $sth->execute($token, $secret, $now, $user); } my $sql = "INSERT INTO tokens (username, token, secret, created_at, updated_at) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)"; my $sth = $db->prepare($sql); return $sth->execute($user, $token, $secret, $now, $now); } sub recallUserAccessTokens { my ($user) = @_; return unless $user; my $db = dbConnect(); my $sql = "SELECT * FROM tokens WHERE username=" . $db->quote($user); my $sth = $db->prepare($sql); $sth->execute; my $row = $sth->fetchrow_hashref; return if !$row || !$row->{username}; return { token => $row->{token}, secret => $row->{secret}, username => $row->{username}, }; } sub forgetUserAccessTokens { my ($user) = @_; return unless $user; my $db = dbConnect(); my $sql = "DELETE FROM tokens WHERE username=" . $db->quote($user); my $sth = $db->prepare($sql); return $sth->execute; } sub reportAccessTokens { my $db = dbConnect(); my $sql = "SELECT * FROM tokens"; my $sth = $db->prepare($sql); $sth->execute; while (my $row = $sth->fetchrow_hashref) { printf( "%-8s: created: %s, last updated: %s\n", $row->{username}, u2pretty($row->{created_at}), u2pretty($row->{updated_at}), ); } } sub recordPublication { my ($username, $content) = @_; return if !($username && $content); my $now = time(); my $db = dbConnect(); my $content_hash = md5_hex($content); if (my $row = recallPublication($content_hash)) { my $sql = "UPDATE publications SET published_at=?,updated_at=? WHERE id=?"; my $sth = $db->prepare($sql); return $sth->execute($now, $now, $row->{content_hash}); } my $sql = 'INSERT INTO publications (username, content_hash, published_at, created_at, updated_at) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)'; my $sth = $db->prepare($sql); return $sth->execute($username, $content_hash, $now, $now, $now); } # end sub recordPublication sub recallPublication { my ($content_hash) = @_; if (ref $content_hash) { # This is the content we need to hash $content_hash = md5_hex($$content_hash); } my $db = dbConnect(); my $sql = "SELECT * FROM publications WHERE content_hash=" . $db->quote($content_hash); my $sth = $db->prepare($sql); $sth->execute; my $row = $sth->fetchrow_hashref; $sth->finish; return if !$row || !$row->{content_hash}; return $row; } sub forgetPublication { my ($content_hash) = @_; my $db = dbConnect(); my $sql = "DELETE FROM publications WHERE content_hash=" . $db->quote($content_hash); my $sth = $db->prepare($sql); return $sth->execute; } # end sub forgetPublication sub reportPublications { my $db = dbConnect(); my $sql = "SELECT * FROM publications ORDER BY username, created_at DESC"; my $sth = $db->prepare($sql); $sth->execute; while (my $row = $sth->fetchrow_hashref) { printf( "%-8s: hash: %s, published: %s\n", $row->{username}, $row->{content_hash}, u2pretty($row->{published_at}), ); } } sub u2pretty { my ($unix_epoch_ts) = @_; my @parts = localtime($unix_epoch_ts); my $fmt = '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'; return strftime($fmt, @parts); } sub dbFile { my $dbfile = Path::Class::File->new("$ENV{HOME}_.plerd_db/twitter_pub.db"); return $dbfile; } sub dbConnect { if (defined $gDBH) { return $gDBH; } my $dbfile = dbFile(); return $gDBH = DBI->connect("dbi:SQLite:dbname=" . $dbfile, "", "", { AutoCommit => 1, RaiseError => 1 }); } sub dbTableSchema { return ( 'CREATE TABLE publications (id INT AUTOCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, username CHAR(8), content_hash TEXT, published_at INTEGER, created_at INTEGER, updated_at INTEGER)', 'CREATE TABLE tokens (id INT AUTOCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, username CHAR(8), token TEXT, secret TEXT, created_at INTEGER, updated_at INTEGER)', ); } sub dbInstall { my $dbfile = dbFile(); if (-e $dbfile) { die("$dbfile exists. Halt. Remove file to force reinstall.\n"); } if (!-d $dbfile->dir) { $dbfile->dir->mkpath || die("mkdir failed: $?"); } my $db = dbConnect(); for my $table (dbTableSchema()) { $db->do($table); } return 1; } sub dbUninstall { my $dbfile = dbFile(); $dbfile->remove(); } sub dbValidate { my $dbfile = dbFile(); if (-e $dbfile) { my $db = dbConnect(); my $missing = 0; for my $known_table ('publications', 'tokens') { my $result = $db->selectall_arrayref("SELECT 1 FROM sqlite_master WHERE type='table' AND name=" . $db->quote($known_table)); if (!$result->[0]->[0]) { $missing = 1; warn "Appears that $known_table is not defined.\n"; } } die("DB file exists, but tables appear to be missing\n") if $missing; } else { say "Creating a data store."; dbInstall(); } return 1; }

I post the code here for those of a hackerish disposition. Note that you need to create an app on twitter's dev site to get all the secret keys and such for three-legged authentication to work.

Plerd supports webmentions to the extent that blog and note entries use the h-entry microformat. Sending and receiving web mentions are handled through Jmac's other nifty project, whim. Plerd also inserts headers into the HTML to lets consumers of the web content know where to push web mentions too.

Because whim is a mojolicious app server, I chose to run it behind a reverse proxy in apache. Why? I wanted pretty URLs and I wanted to use SSL for the blog and web mention traffic. Using the very excellent let's encrypt tools, getting valid certs for apache and configuring httpd to use them was easy.

My plerd uses whim as a REST service to figure out if a blog post has web mentions and to display the content of same. This last feature took a lot of combing out of the reverse proxy configuration, but it now works.

What started as a simple static site generator has morphed into a medium-complexity contraption which also is easy to maintain and reasonable secure.

Now, if I stop working on the Plerd infrastructure, I can focus on making the stock layout of the app a little more pleasant.

I am deracinating myself from Twitter to regain my slow thinking.

Slow thinking is that activity of cognition which strives toward a goal, but indulges in seeming off-ramps and non-sequiturs. It is a desultory journey that stubbornly refuses to be rushed. Yet, patiently following one idea and its subsequent siblings is the path to knowledge, understanding, a wider perspective, and (with luck) innovation. Another word that describes nearly the same thing is play.

Slow thinking is the polar opposite of the hot take culture of Twitter, in which admittedly clever people race against the timeline to emit smart distillations of recent events with novel observations set off by hip snark. The thrill of jockeying against the torrent of posts is potent.

The immediacy of interacting with sharp minds is addictive, especially so for me. Twitter is like a round-the-clock cocktail party at a virtual Algonquin club. I have commented on the posts of actors, comedians, journalists, directors, technologists, astronomers, economists, tabletop game designers, and actual literary legends. My digital bon mots have often met with the Twitter equivalent of a polite nod, but rarely more.

But therein lies the danger.

As Game

Twitter is a game. It has a scoreboard in the form of a followers count. It has power-ups called Likes. It has virtual territory in the form of retweets. It has stylized combat, like an MMO: Player versus Player, teams versus teams, and a king-of-the-hill mode in which crowdsourced abuse is focused on one person. Watch with fascination and horror as your words ricochet around the world, getting recontextualized, meme-ified, subverted, inverted, and perverted. On Twitter, there is no assumption of good will. Will you be trending this hour? Will that help your career or end it? Should you start a wikipedia page about this? Too late, another hashtag has overthrown you. Sadness. Failure. You were so relevant to the zeitgeist so very recently. Shame, but you always get another life here. Ready player one.

The cleverest way in which social media hacks the human brain is by turning the approbation of your community into a discrete integer. How many books, plays, soap operas, and movies have characters struggling to find a clear sign of their value among their peers? In the real world, trying to resolve your place in the pecking order is subjective and squishy. Twitter has solved this messy problem. Numbers do not lie. Simply compare your numbers to others and a clear ranking obtains. I have long struggled against this pernicious hack, but I fear Twitter is winning my heart and mind on this, particularly with their Analytics view. It encourages me to think about my timeline as a business which is either succeeding (the graph line is rising!) or failing (I lost how many followers this week?!).

The only one who wins at Twitter is Twitter.

As News

Twitter is a source of news. In an unprecedented way, current events spread much faster on this social media platform than traditional media of newspaper (natch), radio, or television. But not all news spreads equally fast on social media. There is a kind of "mob" bias as to what is reported. Stories about cute things, celebrities, or moral transgressions are preferred over posts about science, economics, or other "niche" hobbies. Twitter alone cannot and should not replace traditional news outlets, although it is possible to follow the accounts of the Associated Press, Reuters, even your local new paper on that platform (as I do).

Twitter is a place you can go to learn about your privilege. Think you don't have it? If you are reading this post on device you own, congratulations. You have more household wealth that half the planet (although, if you reading this on a flip phone in the heart of an increasingly connected Africa, India, or South America, cheers! You are the future of the Internet). You have unprecedented access to knowledge and tools that can change the course of history. How are you using this thing again?

Even before those haunting videos of systemic violence against people of color, I was aware that my life was spared certain classes of indignities, terrors, and hostilities merely based on a genetic quirk that limits melanin production in my skin. The cause of the anger in the streets is not genetic, but social, which makes this enduring, widespread pain even more baseless and futile.

But Twitter made the systemic, relentless outrages of people of color visceral and urgent. And that is an unqualified Good Thing. For that (and the Arab Spring and the early massive protests against the Trump administration and whatever the next Massive Online Social Protest will be), Twitter should absolutely continue to be A Thing. It has been said that "God made all men, but Sam Colt made them equal." However, I rather think social media is now the thing that gives a righteous cause of the downtrodden the channel to speak to power in an effective way.

As Inquisitor

Twitter is a virtual town pillory, optimized by generative antagonistic networks to drag villains into the spotlight. And when we run of the real villains, those who are merely human are tossed into the stockade instead. The Two Minute Hate will proceed on schedule. There is no time for reflection or mercy. No patience with the muddled headed who are too slow in relinquishing their quaint twentieth century prejudices. No points for those who are older and wiser now, but were filmed when they were younger and foolish. May those on future Twitter be kinder to those on current Twitter.

Outrage. It is the rocket fuel of tweet storms. It's a helluva drug and it induces engagement on the platform like nothing else. You had best be on the right side of the argument when the conversation comes to your timeline. Nevermind that you know that there are three sides to every story. Forget that the whole story is rarely ever known to the public or that important facts take time to discover. BAD PEOPLE HAVE BEEN DOING BAD THINGS FOR A VERY LONG TIME. WE WILL NO LONGER BE SILENT ON THEIR PERFIDY AND GAS LIGHTING.

And I agree. There are bad people whose fame and wealth shielded them from the consequence of their actions (heck, even being a poor white male seems to be enough sometimes to do the trick). And then there are those who had said dumb, hurtful things loudly in a public place. Binning these two groups together is a mistake, even though when you squint it seems like justice to do so.

I could be just me. I need more time to chew on stories. Even seemingly obvious ones, like the political moves of the two national political parties. Am I confident that I can correctly distinguish between a righteous dogpiling and an astroturfed one? Life is messy and I just have not done my homework as well as I could have because I have been bouncing around in a shouty river.

As Business

At the bottom of it all, Twitter is a business. They offer a service for authoring and publishing your micro blog. Can you download your own content? As long as Twitter decides you can. Twitter uses the explicit demographic information that you give them in your profile, along with your followers/following lists, and the content (and metadata) of your posts to create a customer profile of you to sell to advertisers. You can be forgiven for thinking that you are owed a cut of that revenue. The platform has paid you in kind with their publishing service for your content and your advertising profile. Twitter is free in the same way an office "gives" you a desk to work on. I was fine with this arrangement for 12 years until I wasn't any longer.

There are many right-thinking, respectful users on Twitter who have long begged for changes in the platform that curb its worst abuses. Twitter has provided some tools to help, but far from enough. Accounts of extreme reactionaries are still on the platform. Twitter's maintains that it wants to be neutral on the content it publishes, but this is manifest nonsense. Content that hurts their advertising revenue they are happy to remove. Content that does not? Not so much.

As Prologue

Part of my privilege as a technologist is possessing the know-how to write my own publishing platform and having the resources to pay for hosting. To extract the best value from Twitter, I will follow choice accounts from a distance. I will directly post sparingly, instead using web mentions and syndication plumbing to turn Twitter into my distribution channel. With time, maybe I can turn this baroque mechanism that I am assembling to something others can use to rediscover their own independence.

I absorbed a great many positive things on Twitter. I learned a lot from people who are not like me. I made a few of them laugh. But I do not believe I have repaid their lessons very well. I am no modern Walden, but maybe this is a better season for slow thinking.

This was also posted to /en/social_media.

Here are some design ideas for extending my fork of Plerd to implement notes.

What are notes?

Notes are twitter-like short posts lacking markup or titles, but may have embedded tags. Structurally, these notes should be published marked up like Indieweb Notes.

Note tags are implemented as post tags and will be visible on the Archive view generated by Plerd.

Notes do not support markdown. Adding structure to notes seems antithetical to their purpose. Plerd::Posts already support markdown quite well.

Notes also do not support attribute tags, like posts. These are simple blobs of text.

The only formatting that will be respected are spaces and new lines, since the post will be wrapped in block element styled with white-space: pre.

URLs should also be replaced with HTML anchors. No URL shorteners are required since there is no limit on the size of notes.

The first line of a note may be treated specially. If the line contains a valid URL preceded by a "command" string, it should generate a citation. Commands are:

-> [The note is a reply to the document at the given URL] ^ [The note approves, supports, endoreses the content of the given URL]

The note is marked up using the h-entry microformat and is intended to be consumed as a web mention.

See the Example notes at the end of this document.

How are you going to make this a thing?

The user should create a new directory for note posts. The default will be:

Path::Class::File->new($config->source_directory, "notes");

Which is to say, a subdirectory off of the source directory.

The method Plerd::publish_all should scan the notes source directory for new notes. When a new note is detected, it is parsed for tags, which are recorded in a memory, just like posts.

Also like posts, notes are written back out to the original source file with a filename that begins with a Unix epoch timestamp (with microsecond resolution? Thinkie!).

The URI to a specific note should be something like:

http://bloghost/note-[EPOCH].html

Notes should have a phrase which should be the HTML anchor text. This phrase should consist of the first 5-7 words of the post. Some clever heuristic could be devised to create a pleasant phrase.

Example link to a note

The template code might look like:

Check out <a href="[% note.uri %]">[% note.title ]</a>

The rendered HTML might look like:

Check out <a href="http://bloghost/note-1593786477.html">Why I like cats</a>.

The attributes of the note object mirror a Post.

Example of rendered note

<div class="h-entry"> <div class="e-content">Why I like cats? Why wouldn't I? <a href="http://bloghost/tags.html#tag-favorite_things">#favorite_things</a> </div> </div>

Not shown in this sample are the author attribution and other metainformation, as per the h-entry microformat.

When notes are published to HTML, tags are to be hyperlinked, in the same way posts are.

Notes Roll

Notes are collected into a view called Notes Roll, which is a reverse chronological view of published notes. At the bottom of this roll should be a link to the Notes Archive view.

Because notes are expected to grow without bound, only the most recent 25 notes will be shown. All notes should be shown in a list view like the Archive view.

Notes feed

The most recent notes should be available as a RSS feed.

The front page of the plerd should also so the latest notes in the sidebar.

Architectural considerations

Notes should be a subclass of Plerd::Model::Post and have a its own template.

NotesRoll is a model class with its own template.

NotesArchive is a model class with its own template.

NotesFeed is a model class with its own template.

Plerd::publish_all() needs to detect notes and republish affected views as needed.

Example note 1 (unicode, tags)

I hate Mondays. â¹ï¸ #mondays #rainydays

Example note 2 (preserve spacing)

Acrostics Simply Satisfy Humans Ordinarily Living like mE

Example note 3 (reply-to citation)

->http://facebook.com/ This garbage site is garbage.

Example note 4 (like citation)

^https://twitter.com/ Although it too is a garbage site, I rather prefer it to others.

PLERD_HOME=_path_to_plerd_src * * * * * /path/to/plerd_pub.sh

Where plerd_pub.sh is:

#!/bin/bash -l PLERD_HOME=/home/jjohn/src/plerd_taskboy3000 cd $PLERD_HOME && ./bin/plerdcmd -P

Clunky, I know. Worth it for me, since plenv offers crazy flexibility.

Also, the source file name from bear isn't going to be a problem.

I would like better control of the export filename, but maybe I can finesse this in code?

Like assume the first line of the file is the title if the second line looks like an attribute? This seems like murky waters.

Also, the triple backticks used in beer for preformatted clashes with the markdown/smartypants stuff baked into plerd. So, does this work?

Hello, ð

Maybe?

I am currently a fulltime employee of MathWorks and not looking for new opportunities. I am a tabletop game designer and music composer in my spare time. Here is the latest from the top of my mind: {latest post} {post} {post} Here's a link to older posts.

This would enrich the typical now page, but also give it a microblogging aspect, which should help get me off twitter, while controlling my own content.

Since I use (Plerd)[https://github.com/jmacdotorg/plerd] as the blogging engine, I could implement this in a few ways, but I lean towards adding a new header in posts called "rubric", which is really just a subdirectory under the publication_directory.

I then want Plerd to consider only non-rubric posts for the top-level recent posts and tags, while rubric subdirections should get a parallel web structure to the top level (e.g. recent posts, tags, etc).

Maybe rubrics just need archive pages and a recent post thingie? Maybe rubric tags are part of the top level tag set? I am thinking this through now.

Once again, I caught between doing my thing and building a framework.

To this end, we have created a fiction that our home is a luxury space ship, the USS CosyTown, on route to colonize Mars.

To track our daily progress, I created a simple, no image file, pure CSS and vanilla JavaScript web app called Mission to Mars.

As nice as a toy as this is, this was primarily a learning excerise to better understand VSCode, npm, and newer CSS tricks (new, at least, to me).

While I am not ready to jump onboard the all JS/npm bandwagon yet, I am pleasantly surprised how nice the workflow is for simple web projects.

(h/t to @pinboard on Twitter for posting this pyramid graphic)

When I develop web apps (which these days are generally small, intranet business apps), I use Perl 5.2x and Mojolicious for the core stack. MySQL, apache and my custom ORM are also part of that stack, but let's leave that for a future post.

My front-end JavaScript and CSS footprints are fairly small: Bootstrap 4.x (which currently requires jQuery), and Font Awesome 5. Because of all the wonderful things ECMAScript 6 has brought, I have been weening myself off jQuery (quite successfully).

Understand that my web apps are not Single Page Applications (SPA). I have no requirements to make such apps and I have always found them problematic. There is nothing quite like a browser page refresh to re-establish a sane web app state.

For a while, I have been using the trick of adding the current controller name to an outer wrapper in the layout, something like this:

<!doctype html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"/> <title>Document</title> </head> <body> <div class="container controller $THIS_CONTROLLER"> $VIEW_CONTENT </div> </body> </html>

Since the layout is implemented by a server-side templating engine (usually Template Toolkit), it is easy to get the name of the current controller and insert that into the layout even before the view-specific content is available.

Why do this? Scoping your DOM in this manner makes it trivial to scope CSS elements to specific views. Imagine I have a controller called Users. I might have controller-specific CSS that looks like this:

h3 { font-size: 1.5 rem; color: yellow } .Users h3 { font-size: 120%; color: pink; font-style: italic }

This ensures that all the H3 tags on any view generated by the Users controller appears larger, pinker and slantier than H3 tags found on other pages.

Scoping CSS brings a great deal of structure to CSS quite easily.

ECMAScript 6 defines modules, which create a compartmentalization of code long lacking in JS. The top level HTML makes a top-level JS script as a module like this:

<script type="module" src="./top-level.js"></script>

Inside of that top level JS script, you can use import statements (which syntactally borrow a lot from python) to pull in other JS modules using the Fetch API. Finally, ECMAScript 6 introduces a class statement along with an extends mechanism so that you never have to think about prototype again.

Just like CSS can be scoped to controllers, it occurred to me that JS modules can be scoped to controllers!

<!doctype html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"/> <title>Document</title> </head> <body> <div class="container controller $THIS_CONTROLLER"> $VIEW_CONTENT </div> <script type="module" src="js/$THIS_CONTROLLER.js"></script> </body> </html>

Common code can be factored into classes used by multiple controller-level modules. This brings a tremendous amount of structure and sanity to web apps that have long been missing.

Hope this inspires you to try out this pattern in your own projects.

As you may know, you can use gmail to send mail, but you need to jump through some hoops. In the following example, I am going to show how to connect to gmail using SSL/TLS and the PLAIN AUTH protocol for passing SASL credentials.

Be warned: you need to allow "less secure" apps from your Google settings. This allows you to use your gmail username and password for authorization credentials. The more secure way is to use 2-step auth, which will generate a seperate password for just this app. I leave this as an excerise for the reader.

You will need (according to the docs and my own experiments), the following modules:

• Email::Sender
• Email::Simple

If you install these with cpan or carton, the dependencies will be handled for you. There are Moose deps, but it is worth it.

You will need the following use statements:

use Email::Sender::Simple ('sendmail'); use Email::Sender::Transport::SMTP; use Email::Simple; use Email::Simple::Creator;

First, create the transport object. This contains the details talking to the remote SMTP server (which, in this case, is smtp.gmail.com).

my $transport = Email::Sender::Transport::SMTP->new({ host => 'smtp.gmail.com', port => '587', ssl => 'starttls', sasl_username => 'ACCOUNT@gmail.com', sasl_password => 'SECRET_WORD', debug => 0, });

I believe most of these parameters are self-explanatory, but note the debug switch. Set this to 1 if your messages are not being delivered. It helps a great deal.

Next, we need to create the email message.

my $email = Email::Simple->create( header => [ To => 'SOMEONE@SOMEWHERE.TLD', From => 'ACCOUNT@gmail.com', Subject => 'Some important announcements', ], body => $msg, );

If you understand SMTP, then header section may make more sense. You can put any allowable SMPT header here. In this case, I am only sending simple ASCII messages, so a dumb string works for the whole of the body. If you wanted to send HTML, you would need to figure out attachments, which is a task I send you on with my blessings.

Finally, bring these two objects together using the sendmail function exported from Email::Sender::Simple module like this:

sendmail($email, {transport => $transport});

If this should fail, it will die. You may want to wrap this in an eval if you want to suppress that behavior.

I hope this helps you on your journey with Perl.

Can I change the file name? Yes.

Looks like there is spell check.

Seems OK, actually.

Does dropbox sync work? Yes.

2019 saw the first big outreach project of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation in the form of a conference named NarraScope. I was luckily enough to attend it, as it happen essentially in my backyard. Since this is the only conference I will be going to this year, NarraScope is sort of my Comicon and The Perl Conference bundled into one event.

The three day conference kicked off Friday night in the Stata building of MIT. If you have never been inside this building, it does indeed appear to be the site of a tragic Star Trek teleporter accident.

Although I missed the opening day on Friday, I did make it on Saturday, where I was greeted by Jason Scott in full conference regalia. This was our first meeting IRL, which went swimmingly. We compared our statin prescriptions and I missed most of the keynote talk.

I then attended the State of Twine talk by Chris Klimas, which was really motivating for me. I do not have the time for a lot of side projects, so I feed vicariously off those who do. Twine is having very typical growing pains that are common for open source projects. Logistical issues like deciding what is the right feedback back mechanism for the community, who's steering the project, etc. elicited deja vu. Inform's [Graham Nelson], who was in attendence at the time, echoed the same issues. Some of this is where IFTF can and should help. Other aspects, these projects will have to figure out. I was super jazzed to be in the room.

After lunch, I attended the performance of Squinky's "How Making Videogames Turned Me Into a Depressed Gay Communist" and it was intense. To describe it will not help. You have to see it for yourself.

I then chatted with Graham Nelson for a long while, professing my admiration for Inform, which I compared favorably to Perl. Inform will be open sourced under Larry Wall's Artistic License, about which I am gladden. Also connected with Aaron Reed of Blue Lacuna fame.

Although the conference continued, I needed to get back home. My thanks to IFTF for pulling together a great conference. Here's hoping for bigger and better things next year.

First, you need a modern perl (I'm using perl 5.24 via plenv).

You should install Carton next. It will make everything easier.

$ git clone git@github.com:jmacdotorg/plerd.git $ cd plerd $ carton

Create a new file called env.sh. Make it look like this:

#!/bin/bash # source me: ./env.sh # export APP_HOME=[REPLACE WITH YOUR PATH TO plerd] export PERL5LIB=$APP_HOME/local/lib/perl5 export PATH="$APP_HOME/local/bin:$PATH"

Replace items within [] using appropriate values.
Save this file and then source it:

$ source ./env.sh

Now you can run:

$ perl Makefile.PL âPREFIX=./local $ make && make install

I think there is a way to force plerd into the local/lib/perl5 structure. For now, I just moved these manually.

$ mv -v local/share/perl/5.24.1/*pm local/lib/perl5/ $ mv -v local/share/perl/5.24.1/Plerd local/lib/perl5/

You will find plerdall and plerdwatcher in ./local/bin and both should be in your PATH.

Time to make the default plerd config:

$ plerdall âinit

Go ahead and edit that file in the proscribed way.

To run plerdall correctly, you will probably want to change into the newly created plerd directory. This will be inside the git sandbox but whatevs.

$ cd plerd $ plerdall

Interestingly, the following files were empty:

atom.xml feed.json recent.xml

Some of the tag/* files were also empty.

UPDATE: I believe my local disk was full when I tried this, so this is not a plerd problem.

Often, this blog attempted to provide insights into the tech industry. These attempts were meager and weak. At best, I only amplified common knowledge and at worst I put my ignorance on public display.

A significant chunk of the blog corpus reads like a kind of proto-Twitter. There is a lot of personal stuff that lacks context or perspective. It is tempting to attribute these shortcomings to the age of the writer, but there are many examples of great writers who manifested skill early in their careers.

These maudlin observations are an attempt at a ''kaizen'', which is a Japanese word meaning "improvement". A kaizen event is a time dedicated away from normal activities to reflect on what went well and what could have been improved in you life and work.

The outcome of my personal kaizen for this blog is to produce work of higher quality that provides better insights into whatever subject moves me. A good deal of my headspace is in boardgame design, but I also want to share what I've learned about software engineering in the web application space over these past twenty years.

Here is the part of the post were I put a call to action like "subscribe to my atom feed" or "follow me on twitter!". Instead, I will focus narrowly on my content and let the Deep Learning AI at search engines handle the marketing.

"Sick burn," I remarked.

However, this meme got me thinking more about Legacy and single-use games.

Legacy games are versions of existing games with new rules and mechanics that permanently change the components of the game. This means that these kinds of games usually can only be played once (or if campaign-based, only played a set number of times). The most popular version of this kind of game is Legacy Pandemic, which now ships in seasons. This is to say, each season is an isolated campaign that players are expected to finish before going on to the next one.

If you are a traditional or causal boardgammer, you may find the idea of destroying cards or marking up the playing board a startling idea. Let your mind be at ease; It is. However, legacy games are a subset of single-use games, many of which have been with us for some time.

"Real life" escape rooms have become extremely popular. The idea of solving puzzles in real-team with your friends and family is quite fun for a certain class of people. This kind of entertainment is inherently single-use. Sure, you can try to go through the puzzle again, but it probably won't be as much fun.

It isn't surprising that boardgames have tried to capture some of that fun at home using a variety of traditional boardgame elements (particularly cards). Games like the Exit series come to mind. My family has played a couple of these to great effect. Like their real-life counterparts, these boardgames are single-use.

Recently, Z-Man games introduced a Choose Your Own Adventure IP-branded game that plays like one of the classic CYOA books I grew up reading. The designers did a great job of translating the experience of those books to a cooperative gaming environment. Some have complained that it isn't much of a game, to which I agree. However, it was a fantastic, single-use activity.

It only recently occurred to me that there is little new about the genre of single-use games. One of the most successful games of my youth was inherently single-use although it was careful never to point out this fact. Trivial Pursuit, with its admittedly large, but fixed collection of question-answer pairs, surely must be included in this group of games. Trivial Pursuit later sold new "editions" of thematically linked questions (e.g. the Silver Screen edition, the Baby Boomer edition, etc.) that pointed to the single-use nature of the core mechanic.

Others have pointed out that criticism the "disposable" nature of single-use games ignores that most boardgames are played but a handful of times, even the wildly popular ones. If you can get a couple of hours out of game that you can't play again, you have a story that will last a lifetime.

I will ping the plerd development team (hi, Jmac) and see if there is interest in adding this tool to the plerd/bin directory (which is where I have it).

Increasing, my version of plerd is drifting from the released version. When plerd gets tags (jmac's re-implementation of a feature I contributed), then I will try to merge these codebases together again.

From previous post, you can see that I am experimenting with managing photos. Plerd's killer feature is its integration with Dropbox. This really enables a powerful and flexible blogging platform for those used to composing in text editors, like me.

#!/usr/bin/env perl use warnings; use strict; use FindBin; use lib ("$FindBin::Bin/../lib"); use Cwd ('abs_path'); use File::Basename; use Getopt::Long; use Path::Class::File; use YAML qw( LoadFile ); use Plerd; our %gKnownCommands = ('regen_all' => \&cmd_regenerate_all, 'regen' => \&cmd_regenerate_file, 'help' => \&cmd_help); main(); exit; #ââ # Subs #ââ sub main { my $opts = usage(); my $plerd = init_plerd(); # Only do one command while (my ($command, $action) = each %gKnownCommands) { if (defined $opts->{$command}) { return $action->($plerd, $opts); } } return; } # end sub main sub usage { my %opts; GetOptions( "help" => \$opts{help}, "R|regen-all" => \$opts{regen_all}, "r|regen:s" => \$opts{regen}, "v|verbose" => \$opts{verbose}, ); if ($opts{help}) { dump_usage(); exit; } my $has_command = 0; for my $command (keys %gKnownCommands) { $has_command |= defined $opts{$command}; } if (!$has_command) { die("No command given. See âhelp for details.\n"); } return \%opts; } # end sub usage sub dump_usage { print new($config_ref); return $plerd; } # end sub init_plerd sub cmd_help { my ($plerd, $opts) = @_; dump_usage(); return; } # end sub cmd_help sub cmd_regenerate_all { my ($plerd, $opts) = @_; my $start = time(); if ($opts->{verbose}) { print("Regenerating all content. This may take a while.\n"); } $plerd->publish_all(); if ($opts->{verbose}) { printf("Regeneratation completed in %0.2f minutes.\n", (time() - $start) / 60); } } # end sub cmd_regenerate_all sub cmd_regenerate_file { my ($plerd, $opts) = @_; my $source_file = abs_path($opts->{regen}); if (!-e $source_file) { die("Cannot find '$source_file'\n"); } # is the source file within the source_directory? my $dirname = dirname($source_file); if ($dirname ne $plerd->source_directory) { die(sprintf( "File '%s' does not appear to be in the source directory '%s'\n", $source_file, $plerd->source_directory ) ); } if ($opts->{verbose}) { print("Publishing '$source_file'\n"); } my $post = Plerd::Post->new( source_file => Path::Class::File->new($source_file), plerd => $plerd ); eval { $post->publish; 1; } or do { die(sprintf("Could not publish '%s': %s\n", $source_file, $@)); }; # Publishing this new post triggers updates on these other pages for my $action ( 'publish_tag_indexes', 'publish_archive_page', 'publish_recent_page', 'publish_rss', 'publish_jsonfeed' ) { if ($opts->{verbose}) { print("-> $action\n"); } $plerd->$action; } if ($opts->{verbose}) { printf("View your new post here: %s\n", $post->uri); } return; } # end sub cmd_regenerate_file

UPDATE: I spoke to Jmac about this and he pointed out his intention for the exisiting plerdall program to fill this niche. Additionally, the publish all functionality is already there. So I will talk a crack at porting what I have here when I am up and running with the current tip of plerd.

I was today years old when I learned about rotation metadata in the EXIF header of jpgs.

If you would like to get perltidy to format your code in emacs, you will need to do the following:

• install emacs25
• install Perl::Tidy
• install tramp
• install perltidy.el

This is a lot more work than it should be, but this is what I needed to do to get this working under Debian 9.4. Maybe your mileage will vary.

Installing emacs25

This is pretty easy to do on debian:

$ sudo apt-get install emacs25-nox

If you want the X version of emacs, leave off -nox from the package name.

Installing Perl::Tidy

This too is pretty straight forward for perlers:

$ sudo cpan install Perl::Tidy

There are no XS parts of Perl::Tidy so this usually goes fast. Note that if you are using something like Perlbrew or plenv, you probably still want to globably install Perl::Tidy rather than make this a per-project module.

Perltidy's default styling can be overridden by a local ~/.perltidyrc. Here's mine:

# -*-conf-unix-*- # This is how $dayjob thinks of the world and I agree -l=100 -i=4 -ci=4 # âoutdent-labels âoutdent-label-characters=2 âopening-brace-always-on-right âcuddled-else # âbreak-after-all-operators # exception: "or" and "and" read better at the start of the line -wbb="or and ->" # ToDo: Currently we break after these operators: âwant-break-after='. , && || **= += *= &= >= ||= %= ^= x= .=' âwant-break-before='or and -> ? : > -> // % + - * / x != == >= | &' âno-break-at-old-ternary-breakpoints âno-line-up-parentheses âclosing-side-comments âclosing-side-comment-prefix="# end" -cscl="sub : BEGIN END" -csci=3 # Allow up to two consecutive blank lines. âmaximum-consecutive-blank-lines=3 âno-blanks-before-subs âno-blanks-before-comments âminimum-space-to-comment=1 -vt=2 # Maximal vertical tightness -cti=0 # No extra indentation for closing brackets âparen-tightness=2 # High parenthesis tightness -bt=1 # Medium brace tightness -sbt=1 # Medium square bracket tightness -bbt=1 # Medium block brace tightness âno-outdent-long-quotes âno-outdent-long-comments âno-space-for-semicolon âformat-skipping âstatic-side-comments âstatic-side-comment-prefix="##"

Installing tramp

Tramp is a dependency of the perltidy emacs package. Unfortunately, it does not appear to come with the Debian emacs25 package, nor did I find a debian package for this. This leaves us with a from-source code install.

You will need autoconf:

$ sudo apt-get install autoconf

Clone the git repo into a convenient directory (e.g. ~/src/emacs):

$ git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/tramp.git

And then build it:

$ cd tramp && autoconf && make && make check

There were a few unit test failures, but I ignored them.

Now let emacs know about this package by adding the following lines to ~/.emacs:

;;ââââââââââââââââââââââââââââââââ- ;; tramp stuff (add-to-list 'load-path "~/src/emacs/tramp/lisp/") (add-to-list 'Info-directory-list "~/src/emacs/tramp/info/") (require 'tramp)

Be sure to get the paths right in those add-to-list directives.

Installing perltidy.el

If you made it this far, you're a linux/unix pro! The last step is easy.

$ mkdir -p ~/.emacs.d/lisp ; wget -O ~/.emacs/lisp/perltidy.el https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/download/perltidy.el

This adds the perltidy lisp bindings to your .emacs.d directory of local packages. Change the paths to reflect your organization scheme.

If you have not yet done so, tell emacs about your local emacs packages by adding the following to ~/.emacs:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/lisp/")

FINAL STEP: Tell emacs about the perltidy package by editing ~/.emacs

;;ââââââââââââââââââââââââââââââââ- ;; perltidy (require 'perltidy)

Mostly, I use M-x perltidy-dwim on a buffer to indent it, but here's how to bind that operation to the F12 key:

(global-set-key (kbd "") 'perltidy-dwim)

I hope you guessed that this line is added to your ~/.emacs file after the require line.

I hope this makes your life of indenting perl code in emacs all the more pleasant.

I am taking a break from the platform for a while.

This isn't because I got into a fight with someone online or discovered some new terrible business practice of Twitter. This flight from social media is driven by two personal things.

The first is my own dissatisfaction at my constant use of Twitter. Twitter provides a quick diversion when I have less than five minutes to kill. I now realize that I need to embrace that boredom and find a more creative outlet for it. That outlet may even just be whining on this blog in 140 character chunks, but at least it will be something disconnected from a larger, dumber narrative that I do not control.

The other factor is that Twitter is not just depressing me or triggering outrage in me, it is now filling me with despair. Despair is a very potent poison that is best left unopened.

I hope my vacation will push me to work on Plerd stuff more and this blog. I have long been meaning to discourse on what I think modern web applications should look like from the server and client side. Plus, there are a million little tech factoids that I should have been recording here that are now lost to time.

Life is short and there are a lot of books I have not yet read.

UPDATE: Just a note, mostly for me. This post was composed on iOS with the Textastic editor. It features dropbox integretion, which is how Plerd gets articles to post. Textastic does not yet support spell checking, which is a feature I demonstrably need. I guess I can limp along with Google for a bit.

As you may know, I have a small farm of RPIs doing SETI@Home work. I have one head node that all that traffic flows through. This simplifies configuration and makes the farm portal. Here's an architecture diagram via emacs artist-mode.

+ââ-+ ââ+ node1 | | +ââ-+ | +âââ+ +âââ+ | +ââ-+ | Public |â| Pi Head |â|â-+ node2 | +âââ+ +âââ+ | +ââ-+ | | +ââ-+ ââ+ node3 | +ââ-+

I was worried that perhaps the traffic from my six worker nodes was overwhelming the WiFi adapter of my head node. There are two approaches I used to do this.

The first is to look at the performace of short-term bursts. This will give me a flavor for the peak capacity provided by the head node's built-in WiFi adapter. To do this I need nload (a terminal program that provides histograms of network traffic per adapter) and wget.

I open one terminal and run nload -i wlan0 (I do not use predictable interface names because I am ancient). Then I open a second terminal and run wget to fetch a large file. Fitting, the rasbian image is quite adequate for this.

wget -O /dev/null https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_latest

Don't worry about disk space. This command throws all the fetch data into the bit bucket.

My head node is about 4-6 meters from the WiFi access point in my home. I get about 40 - 45 MBit/s on average from this load. Yes, there are a lot of reasons why the load may be delivered as consistently as in a lab setting, but this will give you a flavor for the capacity of your RPI's WiFi service.

If you are on a linux box that supports systemd, you're in luck.

The following file will restart dropbox for you (you will need to change {USER} to username of the account running dropbox).

[Unit] Description=Dropbox as a system service After=local-fs.target network.target [Service] Type=simple User={USER} ExecStart=/usr/bin/env "/home/{USER}/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd" Restart=on-failure RestartSec=1 [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target

This should be copied in /etc/systemd/system/dropbox.service.

The plerdwatcher unit file is a little more involved since on my machine, I run plerd using plenv. Here is the file:

[Unit] Description=Plerd daemon that monitors incoming posts and handles webmentions Requires=network.target After=network.target [Service] Type=forking TasksMax=infinity User={USER} WorkingDirectory=/home/{USER}/src/plerd ExecStart=/bin/bash -lc "cd /home/{USER}/src/plerd && PERL5LIB=/home/{USER}/src/plerd/local/lib/perl5 bin/plerdwatcher start" ExecStop=/bin/bash -lc "cd /home/{USER}/src/plerd && PERL5LIB=/home/{USER}/src/plerd/local/lib/perl5 bin/plerdwatcher stop" Restart=always [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target

As with the previous file, you will need to replace {USER} with your account name. My installation of plerd is in my home directory in a directory called 'src'. Inside of the plerd folder, I have a local directory containing Perl libraries needed for Plerd built for the version of Perl I run plerd with (5.26.1).

You may need to tinker with this scripts a bit, but this should help you get started.

More details later.

This blog is also made by computer and powered by keys. You need a little humor in your blog.

â My Son, Angus

Changes include:

• parsing out "tags" header from post
• creating an index containing all tags
• creating a page for each tag linking to all posts
• allowing individual posts to list tags at the bottom
• templates for same

Blogging like it's 2001 again.

I spent a great deal of time with Jason McIntosh's plerd blogging software. It is with this software I hope to restart blogging.

Plerd is fairly simple to install (if you're a perl nerd) and configure. I hacked and continuing hacking the guts of the Plerd engine to produce the sort of HTML markup that validates and responds to mobile screens in the fashion I would like.

Some of the upgrades I introduced were bootstrap 4.1, Font Awesome 5 and the use of the Monserrat font from Google. I am further working on getting some level of support for blog post tagging, which has to work statically. Heck, maybe I'll even style a tag cloud.

Need to understand how to upload pictures to plerd. If this isn't yet supported, I will make plerd look at the source directory for and images folder or something.

Hold my beer.

Since I couldn't find a jquery/jsonp example that I liked, here is my stab at it.

JSONP is a way of getting around cross-domain restrictions browsers levy on javascript HTTP calls. The protocol makes the server return a JS code fragement of a function that it then executes. Sneaking, right?

Imagine a server with this bit of perl CGI code:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl â use strict; use CGI; sub main { my $q = CGI->new; my $callback = $q->param('callback') || 'foo'; my $data = q[{id:0, name:'jjohn'}]; my $ret = qq[$callback ($data);]; print $q->header("-content-type" => "text/javascript"), $ret; } main();

When run, the output looks like this:

Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=ISO-8859-1 foo ({id:0, name:'jjohn'});

This script is called "ws.pl". It is smart enough to call use a different function name if one is requested by the client.

On the client/JS side, you can use this data this way:

<html> <head> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { $.getJSON('http://games.taskboy.com/ws.pl?callback=?', function (d) { alert("got: " + d.name); }); }); </script> </head> </html>

Here, an alert box will appear. Notice that the callback function producing the alert has received the decoded JSON object and is able to use it directly. No need to worry about injecting SCRIPT tags, etc.

jQuery takes the huge pain of javascript programming out of javascript programming.

Well, it had to happen. I reached my fortieth birthday this week.

Given that my son is a year and change old, I don't have as much time for blogging as I once did.

They say parenthood changes your perspective on many things. Despite my best efforts, I am afraid that has happened to me too.

I launched two web services this year in the social media space: Nestor and Linksnest. While neither is wildly popular, these tools helped me learn the latest web design principals and tools.

Looking back at the start of the year, I see that I began with a stealth project for a friend that involved collaborative filtering and ajax. Need to get back to that at some point.

I sponsored a few kickstarter projects and contributed a prize to the Interactive Fiction Competition. I guess if I can't do stuff myself, I can at least help those who are.

I got a mole on my face removed, but am experiencing some blow-back. Stupid organic body.

I worked for three different companies this year, one of which I worked for twice. We got our house painted and traded in our cars for new ones. I tasted 30 year old Laphroaig. Materially, it was a better year than many others had and I know how lucky I am.

We lost a great old lady cat, Miss Lulu, this year. She will be missed.

I guess I'm not as reflective as I have been in the past. Not enough time.

Following on to yesterday's post about economics, I'd like to present this brief note about how to model role-playing game (RPG) style combat easily with math.

Anyone familiar with Dungeons and Dragons will recall the very tortured set of combat tables broken out by class and level. A simpler method for resolving combat is found in Freeciv.

Assuming a two party combat, you create two attributes for each member: an attack stat and a defense stat. In this system, the bigger the number, the better.

To determine the chance of an attacker hitting the defender, use the following formula:

P(hit) = Attacker->att/(Attacker->att + Defender->def)

This is to say, the chance of an attacker hitting a defender is the proportion of the attacker's 'attack' stat over the sum of the attacker's attack stat plus the defender's defense stat.

If the attack succeeds, some amount of damage is subtracted from the defender's health stat.

I like this formula because it is simple and scales well to opponents of wildly differing strengths.

Attack and defense stats must be greater than 0.

Hope this helps.

update: Removed magic scalar from supply and demand calculations.

This is more of a note to be expanded on later. However, I believe some will find it useful in this raw form.

Many interesting games, like M.U.L.E. and Trade Wars, involve the mechanic of supply and demand. To model this in code, where you calculate demand and supply to arrive at a price, can be done through the following forumlae.

Calculate demand: This is usually a simple count of your potential consumers. Perhaps the number of players will equal demand. This depends on the context of your game. This number will be referred to as 'd'.

Calculate supply: This is a simple count of the number of widgets available that are to be sold. Again, this is contextual. This will be called 's'.

Calculate relative demand: You will need to pick an arbitrary equilibrium number that presents the perfect balance between supply and demand. This number is going to be arbitrary, so let's use 100.

Relative Demand = (d / (100 + d))

Calculate relative supply: This looks a lot like demand:

Relative Supply = (s / 100 + s))

Calculate price: You will pick a price that represents the price at equilibrium. Here, that is 100 currency units. Your number will be different:

Price = 100 * (Relative Demand / Relative Supply)

You must code around the case where supply is 0. The price becomes not-a-number.

The result of these maths is that when demand is high and supply is low, the price increases over some baseline. When the supply is higher than demand, the price lowers. That's mostly how life works.

These formulae will give you a very linear relationship between supply and demand. You may need to tweak this for your game. Inverse logs might be more realistic or even exponential functions. This is most certainly an exercise for the reader.

Please note that this supply and demand model is far from perfect. Most economists will tell you that the variable to look at is price, which then controls supply and demand (this might be a "freshwater" bias). However, most games will want to compute a price rather than predict supply and demand.

Sometimes, you just want to generate mazes. The code presented here is a depth-first search.

A couple of notes about the code below. It works with vanilla, 2D grids, but these can be of varying sizes. The maze data is stored is a simple 2D array. Each room is presented as a hash. The algorithm needs to track which rooms have been visited (more on this later). Any room may also not have a south (bottom) wall or an east (right) wall.

The following code initializes the maze structure:

sub init_maze { my ($max_row, $max_col) = @_; my $maze = []; for (my $r=0; $r < $max_row; $r++) { for (my $c=0; $c < $max_col; $c++) { push @{$maze->[$r]}, {'visited' => 0, 'bottom' => 1, 'right' => 1, }; } } return $maze; }

No surprises there.

The real work happens in the next bit of code, make_maze(). Given a starting point specified by a row and column coordinate in the 2D maze array, it marks the room as "visited". It then looks for neighboring rooms that have not yet been visited. It randomly selects one of these and knocks down the wall between them. It then recursively calls make_maze() with the new room.

Get it? No? That's OK. Recursive code takes a long time to trust.

sub make_maze { my ($maze, $row, $col) = @_; $maze->[$row]->[$col]->{'visited'} = 1; while (my $unvisited = get_unvisited($maze, $row, $col)) { last unless @$unvisited; # Randomly select a neighbor my $choice = $unvisited->[ rand(@$unvisited) ]; # Knock down the wall between them remove_wall($maze, [$row, $col], $choice); # move to this new cell make_maze($maze, $choice->[0], $choice->[1]); } }

There are two details worth investigating. The first is how unvisited neighbors are selected. The second is how to figure out which wall to remove. Here's the unvisited neighbor code:

sub get_unvisited { my ($maze, $row, $col) = @_; my @found; # look for neighbors in cardinal directions; # be mindful of maze bounderies if ($row == 0) { push @found, [$row + 1, $col] unless $maze->[$row + 1]->[$col]{'visited'}; } elsif ($row == @$maze - 1) { push @found, [$row - 1, $col] unless $maze->[$row - 1]->[$col]->{'visited'}; } else { if ($row + 1 < @$maze) { push @found, [$row + 1, $col] unless $maze->[$row + 1]->[$col]->{'visited'}; } push @found, [$row - 1, $col] unless $maze->[$row - 1]->[$col]->{'visited'}; } if ($col == 0) { push @found, [$row, $col + 1] unless $maze->[$row]->[$col + 1]->{'visited'}; } elsif ($col == (@{$maze->[0]} - 1)) { push @found, [$row, $col - 1] unless $maze->[$row]->[$col - 1]->{'visited'}; } else { if ($col + 1 < @{$maze->[0]}) { push @found, [$row, $col + 1] unless $maze->[$row]->[$col + 1]->{'visited'}; } push @found, [$row, $col - 1] unless $maze->[$row]->[$col - 1]->{'visited'}; } return \@found; }

This code is pretty straight-forward. It observes the boundary rooms and makes sure that these rooms have not yet been visited. There are clever ways of reducing this code, but this is easier to understand, I think.

Removing the right wall is simply a matter of looking at two rooms and figuring out if the rooms are joined horizontally or vertically. It is then pretty easy to remove the right or bottom of wall of the correct room.

sub remove_wall { my ($maze, $r1, $r2) = @_; my $selected; if ( $r1->[0] == $r2->[0] ) { # Rows are equal, must be East/West neighbors $selected = ($r1->[1] < $r2->[1]) ? $r1 : $r2; $maze->[ $selected->[0] ]->[ $selected->[1] ]->{'right'} = 0; } elsif ( $r1->[1] == $r2->[1] ) { # Columns are the same, must be North/South neighbors $selected = ($r1->[0] < $r2->[0]) ? $r1 : $r2; $maze->[ $selected->[0] ]->[ $selected->[1] ]->{'bottom'} = 0; } else { die("ERROR: bad neighbors ($r1->[0], $r1->[1]) and ($r2->[0], $r2->[1])\n"); } return; }

It would be useful to print out a bird's eye view of the maze and that's done (admittedly awkwardly) in the following routine.

sub print_maze { my ($maze) = @_; my $screen = []; my $screen_row = 0; for (my $r=0; $r < @$maze; $r++) { if ($r == 0) { # Top border push @{$screen->[$r]}, '+'; for (@{$maze->[0]}) { push @{$screen->[$r]}, 'â', '+'; } } for (my $c=0; $c < @{$maze->[0]}; $c++) { my @middle; if ($c == 0) { push @middle, "|"; } push @middle, " "; # room center if ($maze->[$r]->[$c]->{'right'}) { push @middle, "|"; } else { push @middle, " "; } push @{$screen->[$screen_row + 1]}, @middle; my @bottom; if ($c == 0) { push @bottom, "+"; } if ($maze->[$r]->[$c]->{'bottom'}) { push @bottom, "â"; } else { push @bottom, " "; } push @bottom, "+"; push @{$screen->[$screen_row + 2]}, @bottom; } $screen_row += 2; } for (my $r=0; $r < @$screen; $r++) { for (my $c=0; $c < @{$screen->[0]}; $c++) { print $screen->[$r]->[$c]; } print "\n"; } print "\n"; }

Finally, here's the main line:

my $dimension = $ARGV[0] || 5; my $maze = init_maze($dimension, $dimension); my ($startRow, $startCol) = (int(rand($dimension)), int(rand($dimension))); make_maze($maze, $startRow, $startCol, undef); print_maze($maze);

Hope this helps get you started in the wonderful world of maze building!

Linksnest is a new web tool I have developed to help you collect and manage URLs mentioned by you or your friends on social media sites, like Twitter or LinkedIn.

You can even see your latest collected links as an RSS feed.

It's free to use and I think pretty easy to understand. Please give it a try and tell me what you think.

The inspiration for this post comes from the mysql forum.

The problem is common enough: you want your SQL tables to have unique, secure primary keys. You also don't want to kill your database performance by using string UUIDs as keys. You also don't want serialized auto numbering for keys that may present security risks later on.

One very solid solution to this problem is an IDs table. That is, create a table that holds the list of all important IDs to be used by all other tables in your schema. Such a table might look like this:

create table ids ( id bigint unsigned not null primary key, taken tinyint default 0 );

Any time we run out of IDs, we can generate new ones with this stored procedure:

CREATE PROCEDURE create_ids (create_id_num INT) BEGIN DECLARE CONTINUE HANDLER FOR SQLSTATE '42000' BEGIN END; SET @i = 1; loop1: LOOP INSERT INTO ids (id) VALUES (FLOOR(1 + RAND() * POW(2,63))); SET @i = @i + 1; IF @i > create_id_num THEN LEAVE loop1; END IF; END LOOP loop1; END;

Now when one of your tables needs a new id, simply grab a random open one from the IDs table:

SELECT id FROM ids WHERE taken = 0 LIMIT 100; UPDATE ids SET taken=1 WHERE id=? AND taken=0;

In scripting language land, grab a set of ids and attempt to make the UPDATE with one of them. If the update fails, then some other process grabbed that ID. That's no biggie, just try another.

What if we run out of IDs? Create a trigger that ensures that there are more IDs created when the last one is taken:

CREATE TRIGGER make_additional_ids AFTER UPDATE ON ids FOR EACH ROW BEGIN IF (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ids WHERE taken = 0) = 0 THEN CALL create_ids(1000); END IF; END;

While there are some race conditions I've glossed over, this is a pretty good framework for having solid numeric IDs, which most databases want to fast comparisons.

I am continuing to poke around python this week looking the "standard way" to make HTTP requests and process HTTP responses. In Perl, there is the very complete LWP set of modules. In Java, there is the Apache HTTP client library. Python has several modules with related functionality, including httplib, urllib and urllib2 (which will change with Python 3.0).

What I need to do is create HTTP headers in the request and later read headers from the response. Oh, and I will want to look at the response's body too.

The code below makes an HTTP to a small PHP script I have on this server (use it as needed). It sets a header, which is echoed by the PHP script. Later all the headers from the response are also echoed.

One of the things I like about urllib2 is the Request class. In the things I want to do (web services, OAuth), it is very helpful to build the request and be able to inspect it apart from the mechanism that performs the HTTP fetch.

import urllib2 import pprint import sys url = "http://taskboy.com/blog/h.php" R = urllib2.Request(url) R.add_header("User-agent", "jjohn/1.0") try : f = urllib2.urlopen(R) headers = f.info().headers c = f.read() # content except : e = sys.exc_info()[0] print "Oops: ", e exit; print "Content: " + c + "\n" print "HEADERS: "; for k in headers : print "'" + k + "'"

If I understand the Internet correctly, the new hottness for doing oauth stuff in Python is this oauth2 library. This twitter doc is a little out of date, so here's my version of it.

import oauth2 as oauth from pprint import pprint import json def req (url=None, http_method="GET", post_body='', http_headers='', key='', secret='' ) : con = oauth.Consumer(key='ConsumerKey' secret='ConsumerSecret') token = oauth.Token(key=key, secret=secret) client = oauth.Client(con, token) res, content = client.request( url, method=http_method, body=post_body, headers=http_headers, ) return content c = req(url="http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/home_timeline.json", key='AccessToken', secret='TokenSecret') if len(c) > 0 : pprint(json.loads(c))

You get the consumer key and secret by registering an app on Dev.twitter.com. The Access Token and Token Secret come either from dev.twitter.com (for debugging only) or through the oauth login process by which a request token is exchanged for the access token and token secret.

Note that client.request() performs HMAC_SHA1() signing of the paramters. It looks like if you pass in post_body, the parameters will be parsed and signed too. Still, it is weird that this method doesn't simply take a dictionary object for parameters.

The real difference is how the library is included. Confusingly, the script in the examples directory of this library does not correctly include itself (the project was forked and not all the cruft was cleaned up :-)

Over the past several months, I have been slowly pulling together a project that I hope others will find useful. It is called Nestor.

Nestor is an analytics tool that provides trending information for followers and retweets on Twitter.

The service is free and not spammy. Since authentication is done through Twitter, I don't even collect email addresses.

What I need are users on the system who are not afraid to give me feedback.

I am looking to improve the following areas:

• User experience
• Quality of data
• Improving data visualizations
• Security
• Protecting user privacy

If this is something you are interested in, please send mail to jjohn@taskboy.com for a free registration code to get on to the system. Or message me on twitter: @taskboy3000

UPDATE: Registration codes are boring! Just login, accept the terms of service and pass the captcha test. Easy, right?

I want to be clear: this is not an open source project. It could become that at some point, but it is not one now.

UPDATE: Nestor is closed for a while. Thanks for your interest.

update: Looks like that's fixed now.

This command line program is to be invoked with a filename of a graphic file (any supported by pygame including jpg, png, gif, etc). To exit, press escape. To reduce the image by half, press the minus key. To increase the image by x2, press the equals/plus button.

Sure, the scaling is lossy, but this is a quick and dirty program.

Enjoy!

import os import sys import pygame def reset_screen(res) : screen = pygame.display.set_mode(res) pygame.display.set_caption("pyview") return screen imgfile = "" if len(sys.argv) < 2 : print "USAGE: %s [FILENAME]" % sys.argv[0] sys.exit() imgfile = sys.argv[1] if not os.path.exists(imgfile): print "USAGE: %s [FILENAME]" % sys.argv[0] sys.exit() S = pygame.image.load(imgfile) screen = reset_screen((S.get_width(), S.get_height())) S = S.convert() # Need screen init while True : for e in pygame.event.get() : if e.type == pygame.QUIT : sys.exit() if e.type == pygame.KEYDOWN : if e.key == pygame.K_ESCAPE : sys.exit() if e.key == pygame.K_MINUS : S = pygame.transform.scale(S, (S.get_width()/2, S.get_height()/2)) screen = reset_screen((S.get_width(), S.get_height())) if e.key == pygame.K_EQUALS : S = pygame.transform.scale(S, (S.get_width()*2, S.get_height()*2)) screen = reset_screen((S.get_width(), S.get_height())) screen.blit(S, (0,0)) pygame.display.flip() pygame.time.delay(25)

I hope to return with new technical articles in the coming months. But for know, I commend you to my archives.

I recently completed a POC project for a friend that called for a recommendation engine. That is, a mechanism was needed for the application to suggest domain-specific macguffins that similar users are interested in that might also interest the current user. The technique I used is called collaborative filtering. You can read more about this technique and others designed to extract wisdom from crowds in O'Reilly's excellent Programming Collective Intelligence and Ron Zacharski's work in progress called A Programmer's Guide to Data Mining.

Collaborative filtering essentially boils down to two steps:

• Finding credible critics
• Finding the difference in the set of the things liked by the user and the crediable critics

Credible critics are a cute way of labeling that set of users whose tastes are (perhaps) similar to the target user. There are many ways to determine this set, but the method I chose is processor friendly and easy to code.

First, you need a user-specified metric. This could be an actually rating (1-5) of your domain-specific widgets or simple "like" buttons. Whatever the shape of the rating, it must be represented a number.

After a while, your users will have generated a lot of rating data about your widgets. If you take two domain-specific widgets and plot their ratings on a cartesian plane, you'll begin to see patterns. Users who rate these items "closely" to the target user will make excellent credible critics (in theory). The game then is how to determine "close."

The most brain-dead simple method for the calculating distance of two cartesian points is called the Manhattan method. Very briefly, the formula to calculate this is to add the absolute value of the difference of each dimensions and divide these by the number of dimensions. In this case, dimensions are widgets that both users have rated. Let's look at some code.

function manhattan_distance($rating1=array(), $rating2=array()) { $MAX_DISTANCE = PHP_INT_MAX; $distance = $total = 0; foreach ($array_keys($rating1) as $widget_id) { if (array_key_exists($widget_id, $rating2) { $distance += abs($rating1[$widget_id] - $rating2[$widget_id]); $total += 1; } } if ($total > 0) { return $distance / $total; } return $MAX_DISTANCE; }

This function expects parameters to be associative arrays mapping widget IDs to ratings. Here's an example of calling this function:

$user1 = array("widget-1" => 3, "widget-2" => 1, "widget-3" => 5, ); $user2 = array("widget-2" => 5, "widget-3" => 1,); printf("Distance of user1 from user2: %0.2f\n", manhattan_distance($user1,$user2));

You will need to compare every user to each other, which is an algorithm with a runtime of O(n**2). This is not good for large user populations, so some future optimization will be needed. However, that optimization is not covered here.

To make a recommendation, we need to find a few critics with similar tastes. This is to say, we need to find users with the smallest distance from the target user.

function computeNearestNeighbor ($user_id, $user_list=array(), $count=1) { $your_ratings = get_ratings($user_id); $distances = array(); foreach ($user_list as $uid) { $distances[] = array($uid, manhattan_distance($your_ratings, get_ratings($uid)) ); } usort($distances, 'compare_recs'); $tmp = array(); while ($count > 0) { $i = array_shift($distances); $tmp[] = $i[0]; $count -= 1; } return $tmp; } function compare_recs ($a, $b) { if ($a[1] == $b[1]) { return 0; } return ($a[1] < $b[1]) ? -1 : 1; } function get_ratings ($user_id) { // Assume $data is held in a data store $tmp = array(); foreach ($data as $row) { $tmp[$row["wiget_id"]] = $row["cnt"]; } return $tmp; }

Finding the set of closests neighbors really is a fairly mechanical process of calculating the distances of all users to the target one, sorting that set by distance and using some number of the first several users in the list.

That completes the first part of the recommendation process: get the list of critics. Now we need to see what widgets those critics use that our target user is not. With the infrasture we've built, it is straight-forward to get the set of widgets not currently used by the target user.

function recommend_widgets ($user_id, $user_list=array()) { $recs = array(); $seen = array(); $your_ratings = get_ratings($user_id); $nearest_users = computeNearestNeighbor($user_id, $user_list, 3); foreach ($nearest_users as $uid) { $neighbor_ratings = get_invites($uid); foreach ($neighbor_ratings as $widget_id => $rating) { if ($seen[$widget_id]) { continue; } if (!array_key_exists($widget_id, $your_ratings)) { $recs[] = array($widget_id, $rating); $seen[$widget_id] = True; } } } usort($recs, "compare_ratings"); return $recs; } function compare_ratings ($a, $b) { if ($a[1] == $b[1]) { return 0; } return ($b[1] < $a[1]) ? -1 : 1; }

Notice that the sort routine here orders the records by rating is descending order. This means that recommendations with high ratings will be listed first. You should consider whether this is the behavior you want your recommendation engine to have.

Collaborative filter is simply algorithm that invites all kinds of tweaking. There are many better ways to find critics or even to calculate "distance." You might want to add other weighting mechanisms to the recommendations of specific items. The key is to be able to articulate exactly how you want your recommendations to work.

I decided to do some year end number crunching on this web site's usage numbers. These are, of course, generated from the servers access log. I present them here as a benchmark for the future.

In late November, I put an end to remote linking to images hosted here. It was a small drain on resources, but an annoying one.

Frankly, a good bit of the traffic listed above can be attributed to google, yahoo, bing and their moral equivalents spidering this site.

While I'm generally proud of my blog output this year, I still haven't found an audience for this content. Or I haven't found content for this audience. :-/

In any case, this was the year that was.

Putty has been the gold standard for free Windows SSH utilities for almost a decade now. As you might expect from a win32 application, it keeps its stored sessions (the connection meta-data used to connect to various hosts) in the Windows Registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY\Sessions

You may find it desirable to create or update a stored session. While you can use many tools to do this, Python offers a convenient way to do this using the _winreg module. The following is an example of how to iterate through the list of existing Putty sessions.

import _winreg subkey = 'Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY\Sessions' H = _winreg.OpenKey(_winreg.HKEY_CURRENT_USER, subkey) info = _winreg.QueryInfoKey(H); if info[0] < 1 : print "No saved sessions\n"; exit; print "Found the following saved sessions:" i=0; trg = None; while i < info[0] : s = _winreg.EnumKey(H, i) k2 = subkey + '\\' + s H2 = _winreg.OpenKey(_winreg.HKEY_CURRENT_USER, k2, 0, _winreg.KEY_ALL_ACCESS) host = _winreg.QueryValueEx(H2, "HostName") print "\t%s - %s" % (s, host[0]) _winreg.CloseKey(H2) i += 1;

The Windows Registry has five "databases" that you can connect to:

• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
• HKEY_USERS
• HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG

In this case, the app data is stored in HKEY_CURRENT_USER, so that's the base to connect to. Then the subkey can be appended to get to the right place in the hierarchy for the Putty sessions.

Of course, sometimes there are no sessions, so that case must be handled.

The Registry is also a little weird in that what it calls "keys" actually contain many subkeys. Each subkey of "Sessions" will be a saved session. Here's what my registry looks like:

The subkeys are enumerated in the info hash in order. So, it is a simple matter to walk through the this list, get the meta-data for that key and extract useful values from it. Each saved session, for example, as a string "value" called "HostName" that contains the address used to connect to the host. There are many, many values for each saved session, but you'll have to consult the putty source code to figure out what each does.

To change a "value", you need to open the key that owns it. Then invoke the right SetValue() method on it. See the _winreg docs for more. In this case, to change the address of a saved session, to code might look like this:

newIP = "1.2.3.4" _winreg.SetValueEx(KeyToSession, "HostName", None, _winreg.REG_SZ, newip) _winreg.CloseKey(KeyToSession)

This code assumes that KeyToSession has already been opened.

As is my tradition, I make a little blog post to note the milestone of my birthday. Today makes my 39th year on this planet. This year, the deaths in the family were few. Indeed, the arrival of my son, Angus, means that my duty to genetics and family is pretty much over. I guess I can kickback and coast through the rest of life.

Perhaps not quite yet.

My employer, ATG, was acquired this year by Oracle. This means that I will begin the new year as a member of a 100,000 person company. That's sure different.

I am slowly working on a new interactive fiction called "Escape from the House of Dragons." I have the plot roughly outlined, but given my very limited free time, I don't expect a beta version until Q2 of 2011.

Finally, I'm getting inspired to resurrect my old web game, State Secrets. I think I finally understand how to make it fun to play. Unfortunately, I need to scrap the code I've written and start again. That will be will the fourth rewrite of the game.

So, I suppose I'll see you next year at this time? Great.

It's not their content or business model that's done it. It's their CSS. Many of the small icons you see on their site, like the flags, the calandar, even the "like" hand, are all part of one graphic that looks like this:

This is a common strategy for old video games: combine many of your images into one graphic and then carve up the individual cells in memmory. This saves file system handles and load times.

But this trick can't be applied to HTML/CSS. The value in a multi-graphic like this is that browsers will cache this one asset and reuse it many times for one page. That means fewer HTTP requests to FB's servers and faster page load times for the end user. Epic Win.

But how does this work? The answer lies in the same tricks used to apply gradient effects: positioning the asset as a background image and creating a small viewport with the box model. Here's the magic:

<style type="text/css"> .tryme { background-image: url("facebook_icons.png"); background-position: -57px -147px; height: 13px; width: 15px; } </style> <div class="tryme"> </div>

.tryme { background-image: url("/blog/img/facebook_icons.png"); background-position: -57px -147px; height: 13px; width: 15px; }

This is a good hack!

#!/usr/bin/perl â -*-cperl-*- # # For a given image file, reduce the size by 50% or 25% # use strict; use Image::Magick; use Getopt::Std; my $infile = pop @ARGV; unless (-e $infile) { print usage(); exit 1; } my $Opts = {}; getopts('o:24', $Opts); if (-e $Opts->{'o'}) { print("'$Opts->{o}' already exists. Overwrite?[y/N]\n"); my $a = readline(); if ($a !~ /y/i) { print("Halting.\n"); exit; } } # always reduce image my $factor = ($Opts->{'4'} ? 0.25 : 0.5); my $I = Image::Magick->new(); $I->Read($infile); my $height = $I->Get('height'); my $width = $I->Get('width'); my $err = $I->Resize(height => $height * $factor, width => $width * $factor,); if ($Opts->{'o'}) { $I->Write($Opts->{'o'}); } else { # Spew to STDOUT (from the Image::Magick website) my @pixels = $I->GetPixels(map=>'I', height=>$height * $factor, width =>$width * $factor, normalize=>1,); binmode(STDOUT); # for win32 print pack('B*', join('', @pixels)); } sub usage { return qq[$0 - reduce an image size $0 [OPTS] [FILENAME] -o [FILE] Output file name -2 Reduce image dimensions by half -4 Reduce image dimensions by a fourth ]; }

In the abstract, relations are the ways in which objects relate to each other. The most intuitive examples of relations are:

The tea is in the cup. [containment relation] The cup is on the desk. [support relation]

Here the relationship between tea and cup and cup and desk are denoted by the prepositions "in" and "on".

Relations tie things together in various ways. There are mutual one to one relations, one way one to one relations, one to many, one to many groups, etc. See the I7 docs for the full set of these.

However, relations on their own aren't particularly useful. Relations shine in making new I7 verbs robust and interesting. In the docs, there is this example of making a machine that transmutes a bag of jewels into various other things. The example works as advertised, but does contain a subtle bug that prevents "scaling" this code to move into different values of the same state.

In the example code, a thing can be made into other classes of things through the new verb "to become.". In the example, these classes of things are edible, valuable and dangerous. The example defines exactly one thing of each type of class: the bag of jewels is valuable; the bag of gunpowder is dangerous; the bag of jelly beans is (nominally) edible.

If one attempts to add additional concrete things to each class (e.g. the bag of broken glass is dangerous) the given example code does not work. This is because the new form of the object is evaluated twice: once during the "carry out" stage when the "insert" rule is run and once when the report rule is evaluating the string "[the new form of the noun]."

You might wonder why this bug exists at all. I am far from an expert in I7, but it seems that the decide rule for "new form" is called explictly in the carry out rule and then implicitly for the string interpolation during report. Because the decide rule picks a random concrete example of a class from the available list created by the relation, the effect is that that the new form reported by the report rule may not be the thing that appears in the player's inventory.

To fix this, I present the following code. It creates a new player property called "lastChange" that holds the new form of the noun that is generated in the carry out rule. This property is then referred to in the report rule and is added to the player's inventory. This could have also been solved with a global variable called "lastChange," but I think this is cleaner.

[Setup the world] Workshop is a room. The bag of jewels is carried by the player. The player has a thing called lastChange. [Define the transmutation machine] The machine is fixed in place in the workshop. Transmutation relates things to each other in groups. The verb to become (it becomes, they become, it became) implies the transmutation relation. Definition: a thing is transmutable if it becomes more than one thing. [Override standard rulebook] Procedural rule when inserting something into the machine: Ignore the can't insert into what's not a container rule. Check inserting something which is not transmutable into the machine: instead say "You can't transmute that." [ State changes: edible => valuable valuable => dangerous dangerous => edible ] To decide which thing is new form of (obj - edible thing): decide on random valuable thing which becomes obj. To decide which thing is new form of (obj - valuable thing): decide on random dangerous thing which becomes obj. To decide which thing is new form of (obj - dangerous thing): decide on random edible thing which becomes obj. Carry out inserting something into the machine: remove the noun from play; now lastChange of the player is the new form of the noun; now the player carries the lastChange of the player. [This causes the decide rule to execute twice] Report inserting something edible into the machine: say "The machine spits out [the lastChange of the player]."; rule succeeds. Report inserting something valuable into the machine: say "The machine produces [the lastChange of the player]."; rule succeeds. Report inserting something dangerous into the machine: say "The machine coughes out [the lastChange of the player]."; rule succeeds. [Define classes of objects] A thing can be valuable. A thing can be dangerous. A thing can be edible. [Instantiate examples of each class] The bag of jewels is a valuable thing. The bag of gold is a valuable thing. The bag of jelly beans is an edible thing. The bag of apples is an edible thing. The bag of gunpowder is a dangerous thing. The bag of broken glass is a dangerous thing. [Give a start point to the state machine] The bag of jewels becomes the bag of gold, the bag of gunpowder, the bag of broken glass and the bag of jelly beans.

I have written a few tools to help understand the contents of two data files from the venerable Might and Magic 2 RPG. A younger me got a lot of mileage as a player out of this grindcore slug-fest (particularly the Mac version).

The tools are simple Perl scripts written without much care. However, listRoster.pl will dump all the active characters in the Roster.dat file. You can use a binary editor, like emacs with hexl-mode, to poke various fields and what not to make the game less boring.

Each character record is 130 bytes long and is composed of mostly unsigned bytes, but there are a few 16 and 32 bit ints in there as well as one byte that stores different information in its high nibble versus its low.

The main binary for the game, MM2.exe, is only 76KB and could be easily disassembled by those more intrepid than I.

Although I could not intuit what all the bytes in the character record mean, I think I got a useful subset defined that would help anyone wishing to create a real slick character trainer.

Here's what an example dumped record looks like:

17: Paladin : Female Good Human Paladin Level: 7 HP: 305/315 Age: 18 Might: 100 SP: 56 /56 XP: 80905 Intelligence: 10 Personality: 25 AC: 29 SL: 1 Gold: 30659 Endurance: 18 Gems: 8 Speed: 50 Thievery: 0% Food: 30 Accuracy: 100 [no skill] Sandsobar Luck: 18 [no skill] Cond: Good Equipped 0: Plate Armor +1 Backpack 0: Small Shield+3 Equipped 1: Helm +4 Backpack 1: Trident +1 Equipped 2: Great Shield+1 Backpack 2: Naginata +2 Equipped 3: Long Bow +4 Backpack 3: Sickle +2 Equipped 4: Long Sword +4 Backpack 4: BLANK -0 Equipped 5: BLANK -0 Backpack 5: BLANK -0 Spell Book âââââââââââââââââââ-

Note that the character name appears in the top left corner. Here, the character's name really is "Paladin". I stopped giving the PCs in party-oriented RPGs useless names a while ago.

Enjoy.

UPDATE: I have re-organized the project section to break out online games from desktop ones. I have also added a clone of Mastermind.

UPDATE: I have added Battleship too.

Veteran interactive fiction (IF) writer Aaron Reed has created an annotated travelog of the creation of one particular game called Sand-dancer written with the "natural language" tool called Inform 7. His book, Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7, is geared toward semi-technical writers who want to create IF without getting a degree in computer science. Said another way, this book attempts to teach programming without talking about software or hardware architecture. This is a very tall order, but one that Reed has pulled off to a large degree.

I am not disinterested in this subject. I am professional software developer who is very well versed in the dreary details of computer technology, but who is new to authoring IF. When I learn a new platform, I look for a reference guide that will be complete, organized and well-indexed. Neither the standard Inform 7 manual, Writing with Inform, nor Reed's book offer a traditional reference experience. Together, however, these two resources do complement each other well.

In the world of Interactive Fiction, opinion is split over what IF should be. One group holds that IF is another medium for telling stories, just as theatre and movies are. Opposing this position is the "text adventure" crowd, whose proponents hold that IF is a game that may or may not have narrative elements. Reed's work is firmly in the first camp. As such, a good chunk of his text discusses the rudiments of fiction writing. If your interest is in creating "text adventures," you may find these bits of little use.

What Reed gets right is to introduce early in his text the important mechanisms needed to build a model world with Inform 7. Here I am referring to the basics of room creation, objects and properties. His technique for ensuring that important objects are described and handled appropriately is called BENT (Bracket Every Notable Thing). By making every important object bracketed in descriptions, Inform will throw an error if you do not create that object in the model world. The BENT technique is definitely going to help novice IF writers make higher quality games by avoiding some common description errors. Later, Reed shows that text subsitution can be used for even subtler purposes.

The absolute glory of this book is the combing out of the gnarly details of how rulebooks work; his explaining of how to use before, after, carry out and instead rules effectively; and the detailing the clear differences between actions and activities. These are critical concepts for non-trivial IF and the Inform 7 manual isn't as clear as Reed on these subjects.

There is great value in showing novices the "design document" for a game, which Reed does. Those familiar with traditional software development will expect this sort of thing, but in the IF world, it is a little different. The design document is more like a short story with some annotations about game mechanics. This is a productive approach to IF design and a good place for novices to start.

Reed also has copious suggestions for debugging IF with various Inform 7 tools. These include in-game commands such as SHOWME, TREE, ACTIONS and RULES; Inform 7 statements like "change library message debug to dbg_on"; and extensive walkthroughs of the Inform 7 IDE using the skein, index and transcript functions. These tools are critical to smoothing out nits in IF and will be re-read often by new IF authors. It is odd though that the Test command, which is introduced early in the Inform 7 documation is not discussed in any detail.

There are many examples and discussions of Inform 7 extension libraries (although there is little details of how to create one). From conversation handling to player navigation, Reed's tour will help new authors not reinvent the wheel.

As has been said, this book is not designed to be a reference to Inform 7, but an appendix or two of syntax charts and rules tables would not have been unwelcomed. The book is also not very well organized for reference (the same can be said of the Inform 7 manual). For instance, the helpful debugging tips are spread across many chapters. It would be nice to see these collected in once place.

Even after volumnious examples, I still do not have a handle on definitions or relations. Both are introduced very early in the text. These are high level mechanism that should be easy to understand, but the natural language syntax of Inform 7 impedes my apprehension. Reed does provide a helpful table outlining the different kinds of relations, which is a small kindness. However, a good chunk of Sand-dancer depends on these two Inform 7 mechanisms, so I felt a little lost in later places in the book.

If you are even a little curious about creating IF with Inform 7, you really ought to consider reading this book. Reed will not save you from the manual, but he will save you time and a little frustration.

However, we all know about the best laid plans of mice and men.

Submitted for your approval is a Terrible, Old Manse. This is my first attempt at making an interactive fiction game with Inform 7. The game is an interpretation of the classic Atari 2600 game Haunted House.

As you play the game, please do send me a list of typos or weird behavior that you find. It is easy enough to bang out new releases.

Enjoy!

Cook time: 30 minutes + 8 hours of "get happy time" in the refrigerator

Software

• Vegetables:
  • 2lb of red potato (or an equal mix of red/yellow)
  • 1 small (not pearl) onion (any color)
  • 1-2 shallots
• Dressing:
  • 1/4 cup (or as needed) of mayo
  • 1 tbsp of spicy mustard
  • 1 tsp of Worcestershire source
  • 1 tbsp of lemon juice
  • 1/2 tsp of apple cider vinegar
  • A small handle of fresh chopped parsley
• Other:
  • salt and pepper
  • cooking oil (olive oil or a neutral oil is fine)

Preparation

If desired, peal potatoes. Cut potatoes into bite-sized chunks. In a large pot deposit potatoes, several good sized pinches of salt and enough water to just cover the spuds.

Bring to a boil and then back the heat down to medium (you want active boiling (more than a simmer), but not a violent rolling boil). Cook until fork tender (10-15 minutes).

Dump spuds into a colander and hose down with cold water. Do not drown them.

Dice the onion and shallots. In skillet, add a tbsp of cooking oil and turn the heat to low. Add onions, shallots and a pinch of salt. Sweat the aromatics for about 10 minutes. Remove from heat when onions are translucent. Do not burn or caramelize onions.

In a large mixing bowl, add the dressing ingredients. Mix until smooth.

When the potatoes and aromatics are coolish, add to dressing. Fold in the vegetables carefully so as not to destroy the spuds. Add salt and pepper to taste and yes, you have to taste it to know.

Refrigerate overnight. Serve chilled for best results.

NOTE: The full code archive of mechanism described below can be found here

Joomla is a PHP-based CMS that enjoys wide-spread popularity. It's got a many built-in features that make it great for blogs and news-oriented sites right out of the gate. Additionally, it supports three kinds of extension mechanism: components, plugins and modules. Components are low-level facilities that generally support the other two. Modules are often user-visible blocks of HTML that can be selectively added to the page users see. Plugins respond to various events (page rendering, authentication requests, etc) generated by the Joomla application.

Joomla comes with a variety of login plugins that all use the login module. These plugins allow users to be validated against an external authentication mechanism like LDAP or GMail.

Sometimes it is desirable to log users into the Joomla system who have already been authenticated by a different system without asking for their credentials again. This is called signle sign-on (SSO). SSO is a very important usability and security feature of many Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). In this article, I will present a token-based mechanism for creating SSO to joomla using the standard extension methods.

To understand this problem a bit better, it is critical to realize that there are two seperate notions of identity in an SSO schema. There is the previously authorized identity (that is, the identity that the user supplied to the non-Joomla system that originally authenticated them) and the user account on the Joomla system that is stored in the local users table. One of the challenges of SSO is to map the remote identity to the local one. For the sake of this excerise, let's assume that the usernames in both the remote authentication system and the local Joomla one are the same.

The next problem is to create a protocol by which authentication credentials may be passed from the remote system to the local Joomla one. To accomplish this, I choose to use to copy the existing mod_login form and make some minor adjustments to accept HTTP GET parameters. These GET parameters are translated into values in a form that can be processed by the default user compoent. Since the user component calls out the enabled authentication plugins, this the kind of routing is desirable.

This form really needs three bits of information to authorize a user: the username, the session token and a checksum. The username is self-evident. The session token is provided to all authenicated requestors and is discussed more later. The check sum is hash of the username, token and a shared secret known to this system and the remote system passing users to it. More on this later too.

Using a bit of javascript magic, this hidden form is submitted automatically.

Of course, a custom authentication plugin is also required. The plugin needs to read a few of the custom form values that are not passed in through the normal onAuthenticate() call, so it is necessary for the plugin to directly read from the superglobal $_POST. The job of this plugin is very simple. If the token is valid (that is, it can be found in a DB table and is younger than 4 hours) and the hash value of the username, token and shared secret matches the given hash, then the user is authenticated. The user is found in the local system and the response object is populated accordingly.

The session token can be any string identifier. In this case, it is the MD5 hash of the value returned by the PHP built-in uniqid(). This value is generated by a script called 'session.php'. The script generates this value, stuffs it into a DB table and simply echoes the value to the caller.

The key to the security of this system comes from the secret string known only to the remote system that wishes to pass users to the local Joomla system and authentication plugin. This secret is used to generate a hash of the usernam and the session token. By using a hashing mechanism like MD5 or SHA1, this checksum value provides pretty good assurance that the values passed in were from a known and trusted source.

The way the remote system and the Joomla system interact to make this autologin happen is the follow:

• The remote client calls the session.php script on the local Joomla system
• The remote client hashes the session token, username and secret
• The remote client generates a URL to the local Joomla system's homepage that passes in the following GET parameters: u, t, s (for username, token and checksum respectively)
• The remote client redirects the user to this URL
• If the token is authenticated, the user is logged into the local Joomla system as a local Joomla user.

You'll also notice that you could easily map all remote users to one generic Joomla user if that is desirable.

I hope you find this useful in crafting your own Joomla solutions

French Onion Dip

Software:

• 1 cup of white or yellow onions
• 4oz. of beef broth
• 1 good-sized garlic clove
• 16oz of sour cream
• 1 teaspoon of Worcerstershire sauce
• Extra vigin olive oil
• salt + white pepper (black pepper is fine too)

Preparation:

Dice the onions fine. No one wants huge chunks of onions hanging off their potato chips.

Smash and chop the garlic.

Put a non-iron skillet pan over lowish heat. More heat than for a sweat but far less than for a saute. When the pan is hot, add a puddle of oil to the pan. How much? Enough to cover the bottom of the pan, but not more. This isn't a deep fry.

Add the onions and garlic to the pan. Throw a pinch of salt on to the veggies. Let 'em sit there for 20 minutes. You're caramelizing the onions. Give them a stir ever minute or two so that you don't burn them.

When the onions are golden brown and delicious, move them to the sides of pan. Deglaze the pan with the beef broth. Pour the liquid into the pan and using a wooden spoon, scrap up the frond from the pan. Did you notice that the onions sucked up the broth? That's the secret.

Remove the onion/garlic mass to bowl for cooling. I recommend a glass bowl for this, but whatever you use will not affect the final taste.

If you added 1/4 teaspoon of garlic powder, you wouldn't ruin the dip.

Slop into a mixing bowl the sour cream and the worcestershire sauce. Stir until mixed.

When the onion/garlic mass is cool enough to touch, add to the sour cream. If you add the hot mass to the cream, it could curdle.

Add salt and pepper to taste. Do not over salt, especially if you're planning on serving this with potato chips. And I recommend serving this with potato chips.

I suspect that adding an ounce or two of brandy or cognac at the deglazing stage would be the right thing to do, if you've got such things on hand.

Some people will want to replace up to 6 oz of the sour cream with mayo. I think this makes dip too runny, but it is your food to play with.

Serving options:

With potato chips (Cape Cod chips are my favorite) or with a veggie assortment (e.g. carrots and celery).

I've been working with the PHP CMS WordPress a lot lately. It's a pretty simple system that doesn't make its internals hard to get to, which I appreciate.

One of the internal functions WP provides is wp_mail. This, you might have guessed, is used to send SMTP mail. The parameter list for this function is a bit long and long parameters lists are hard to remember:

wp_mail( $to, $sub, $body, $hdrs, $attach );

These parameters are pretty self-evident: mail recepient, subject line, body of message, SMTP headers, attachments. The last two parameters are optional. This works great for sending plain, unformated text messages. However, you may want to tweak this a bit.

The first thing you might want to do is change the default sender. This is done by adding a header:

$to = "nemo@uptopia.com"; $sub = "Your submarine parts"; $msg = "I have the new parts for your fabulous machine."; $headers = array("From: Joe Johnston <jjohn@taskboy.com>"); $h = implode("\r\n",$headers) . "\r\n"; wp_mail($to, $sub, $msg, $h);

This makes the email look like it was sent by me even though the the web server process running the PHP script isn't owned by my account.

Another common task is to send HTML-formated email using this system. To do this, you must change the content type of the message to text/html. This is most easily done through the headers, even though you are supposed to be able to do this through the filter wp_mail_content_type. In my testing, this did not work, but the following code did:

$to = "nemo@uptopia.com"; $sub = "Your submarine parts"; $msg = "<html><body><h1>Awsome news</h1> <p>I have the new parts for your fabulous machine.</p> <address>âJoe</address>"; $headers = array("From: Joe Johnston <jjohn@taskboy.com>", "Content-Type: text/html" ); $h = implode("\r\n",$headers) . "\r\n"; wp_mail($to, $sub, $msg, $h);

By adding the content type to the headers, the recipient's email client should format the message accordingly.

Of course, sending HTML email has risks. It could be caught in spam filters. The client may not support HTML formatting (although that's rare). The client may disable email HTML from using javascript, CSS or grabbing remote assets like images.

Caveat Spammer.

The Apple iPhone OS platform has become increasingly popular target for new development. This is the OS that powers the iPod touch, iPad and of course, the iPhone.

There are two kinds of apps that one can create for these devices. The first is a native application, usually written in Objective-C and published through Apple's App Store. Not only is this kind of app harder to write, but developers may not like their hard work blocked by the whims of Apple.

Because these devices all have at least WiFi access to the internet, it is possible to design web applications tailored to these mobile devices. These "cloud" apps run like normal web applications but must constrain their UI a bit.

iWebKit (ignore the malware site warning if you see it) [download] makes this significantly easier to do. This project is a set of CSS and Javascript files that can give your web app the standard look and feel of other web apps for the iPhone.

There are a few conventions that iWebKit imposes, but these will be familiar to most XHTML developers anyway. In the space of a few hours using this project, I was able to produce a iPhone version of the Feed Bag. If you are using the Safari browser or Google's Chrome, that page will appear much as it would on an iPhone.

While this application is very simple, it does look like a native app. This makes me very happy.

Here's a post to remind me of simple Git procedures. Maybe other people with find this helpful. After using CVS for a decade, it's a bit hard to wrap my head around git, but I'm making that journey.

I'm using github as my repository.

START A NEW PROJECT

mkdir MYPROJECT cd MYPROJECT git init touch README git add README git commit -m "first" git remote add origin git@github.com:/GITHUB_USERNAME/MYPROJECT.git git push origin master

A git repository URL looks something like this: git@github.com:/taskboy3000/Tester.git

Also see

WORK ON AN EXISTING PROJECT

git clone [GITPROJECTURL]

ADD FILES TO LOCAL REPOSITORY

git add [FILE] git commit -m "My comment about the files I added"

You can also add all the files in your project at once:

git commit -a -m "All files, including tilde files, have been added"

UPDATE REMOTE MASTER WITH LOCAL SANDBOX

git commit -m "Final checkin" git push origin master

UPDATE LOCAL SANDBOX WITH REMOTE MASTER

git fetch origin git merge origin master

REVERT LOCAL SANDBOX TO REMOTE MASTER

git reset âhard

This will restore deleted files and overwrite uncommitted changes.

Although you can also delete a local file and check it out from the local repository again:

rm [FILE] git checkout [FILE]

Also see the github book.

Spammers are attempting to use the comment system here for their nefarious purposes. That's why I moderate comments. Here's the body of a comment that will not appear:

First of all, you have a penchant for using verbs in the past tense even if they should not. But hey, you're a computer geek and not a language teacher. Very good you got your things working there and cable problems are often solvedby cable bonds or cable tamers that can be easily bought in computer shops. You know that,don't you?

Here is the article this was attached to. And for the record, that HP monitor died last year, which is disappointing. The 14" El Cheapo brand is still working fine.

The point is, the grammar is fine in that post. You'll have to bait me another way, Senor Spamalot.

I have been working through both the symfony JobBeet tutorial and cakePHP's blog tut. Both are basic CRUD apps. Here's my considered opinion of both.

Symfony is by far the more sophisticated of the two. The class system, ORM integration and YAML configuration really put this framework on par with any written in any other language. It's truly enterprise ready. However, it is simply a beast to learn. Installation virtually requires using an apache virtual host. Creating a skeleton app is easy, but non-intuitive. Just to create and process a simple HTML, you end up touching about 4 or so files in as many directories. Also, there is a heavy reliance on the PHP CLI, which can be an issue if your installation has different versions of php for the shell and apache (which the Mac does). While I can get the JobBeet tutorial going, I cannot get much further â and I have two of the three books from the developers.

CakePHP is a lot simpler, if less ambitious, than symfony. It appears to be pretty lightweight and has no CLI dependency (although there is a lot of automation that is offered by the cake client). The relationship between the model, controller and view is pretty easily grasped. To create a form for an existing model, you're looking at editing two files in two closely related directories.

If you're looking for a solid MVC framework in PHP, you could do a lot worse than cakePHP.

«If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I'd like to do
Is to save every day
Till Eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you»

âJim Croce

If you're anything like me, you live and die by your calendar. Over the years, I've moved from simple paper calendars to the Palm Pilot back to paper and finally ending up online with Yahoo and Google. This brief post talks about creating hyperlinks that add an event to the clicker's yahoo or google calendar.

Of course, not everyone uses these online calendars. Some use Outlook or iCal or some other desktop solution. The key to publishing events for these systems is to use the ICalendar format which most desktop apps can import. The MIME type for such an ICalendar file is text/calendar. You might also consider using the XHTML microformat hCalendar, which I mentioned briefly in an earlier post. However, this microformat isn't likely to be understood by most desktop apps.

First, let's suppose that we have an event that we want to publish. I turn 40 next year, so let's create an birthday party event for that. In the iCalendar format, such an event might look like this:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//taskboy calendar app BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Joe turns 40 just this once ORGANIZER;CN=Joe Johnston:MAILTO:jjohn@taskboy.com DTSTAMP:20100421T105300 DTSTART:20111212T190000 DTEND:20111212T200000 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR

A great deal of this format is boilerplate stuff. The overall container is VCALENDAR, which has a BEGIN and END. Immediately after that is meta-information (like HTML's HEAD section) containing the format version and the app's product ID (which is arbitrary). After the header, the actual VEVENT section begins. There are many types of objects VCalendar can contain including VREPLY, VJOURNAL and VTODO, but this isn't about those (read the RFC for more info). Let's look at the VEVENT attributes in tabular form:

The purpose these elements is relatively self-evident. The datetime format used throughout is the ever-popular ISO8601. The ORGANIZER is given in LDAP format, but the spec does not require it to be so. However, most applications, like Outlook, will attempt to locate ORGANIZER in an LDAP system, so this makes a bit of sense.

Above is a basic, serviceable ICalendar file. You can even check this using the handy ICalendar validator. Enough about the desktop. Let's move on to web-based calendars.

Yahoo Calendar does not, as far as I can see, publish an API. However, people have ferreted out enough information to be useful. By creating a simple HTTP GET request (in the form of a hyperlink), events can be entered into Yahoo Calendar.

The base URL for Yahoo Calendar is: http://calendar.yahoo.com/. The following parameters are required: v=60 and TITLE=event. Next come the metadata for the event itself:

Remember: all parameters must be URLencoded. There is a TYPE parameter that can specify the kind of event. The default is "Appointment" (type 10). See the link to Chris's notes for more options there. The following link will add my Birthday event to your Calendar:

Add to Yahoo

Google Calendar has a similar system, but it is documented. The base URL for adding calendar events is http://www.google.com/calendar/event. There is one required parameter: action=TEMPLATE. Here is a rundown of their parameters:

These parameters need to be URLencoded too. Google differs slightly from the above formats in that the event can have both a label and a description. The start and end time of the event are given in one parameter, which is unnerving. Here's my example event for Google:

Add to Google

Because these links will not return the user to the site they came from, consider using a popup window for these links.

That's the gist of adding events to calendars. Of course, there are a lot more parameters that can be added to these publications and I haven't touched recurring events at all. Still, this is a good jumping off point for your own exploration of the magic of event scheduling.

«iSCSI has become the storage connectivity of choice for small business, with applications such as VMware VI3, Exchange, and MS SQL certified on it. It runs on standard Ethernet networks.»

âGreen Pages

iSCSI is a network protocol that allows remote disks to appear as local devices to computer. At a very high level, this schema falls under the rubric of Storage Area Network. The difference between iSCSI and NAS protocols that deliver file systems like NFS or Samba, is that that the shared iSCSI resources look like local devices to the system using them. This has some interesting consequences for diskless terminals and the like.

iSCSI is a client-server system. The server presents iSCSI targets (hard drives or files that pretend to be hard drives) clients that can use these resources. The clients are called initiators since they start the protocol. That is, servers with targets do not broadcast their services. iSCSI targets must be discovered by initiators.

When a client finds a desired target, it asks for authorization to use the resource via a login command. If that succeeds, a new SCSI devices appears on the client system that's read for partitioning and provisioning. If the disk as already been initialized, then the resouce can be mounted like any other filesystem.

It turns out, configuring iSCSI on Ubuntu (and other linux distros) is pretty straight-forward. Let's first set up a system that offers iSCSI targets. In this example, the target will be a file rather than a physical device.

Log into your Ubuntu machine. Become root (sudo su -) of you aren't. Create a disk image (dd if=/dev/zero of=/iscsi.disk count=0 obs=1 seek=2G). In this case, a empty 2GB file is created at the root of the filesystem. Install the iscsitarget package (apt-get install iscsitarget). Define the new target in /etc/ietd.conf. Edit the file so that it looks something like:

Target iqn.2010-filer.network.local:iscsi.lun1 Lun 0 Path=/iscsi.disk,Type=fileio

The name of the target is pretty arbitrary, but you must have a unique naming convention for resources across your network of iSCSI targets. For more on this, see the Wikipedia article cited above. Since this target is the first one list, it gets Lun 0. This is analogous to how the first disk in a SCSI chain is listed by hardware.

Now, we need to twiddle some permissions. By default, iSCSI targets are not published and allow no initiators. To enable targets to be discovered, edit /etc/default/iscsitarget and set the ENABLE flag to "true". Now allow initiators to discover your targets by editing /etc/initiators.allow. Add a the following line to the bottom of the file ALL ALL.

Finally, we're ready to start the target daemon. This is the process that initiators talk to. To start (or restart it), type /etc/init.d/iscsitarget restart.

Now we're ready to configure the initiator. Simple install the following utilities: apt-get install open-iscsi open-iscsi-utils. Now, discover the targets. In this example, assume that the target machine is called filer.network.local.

iscsiadm -m discovery -t sendtargets -p filer.network.local

You should see a list of available targets offered by the filer. Select one (e.g. "iqn.2010-filer.network.local:iscsi.lun1") and get authorized to use it:

iscsiadm -m node -p filer.network.local \ âtargetname "iqn.2010-filer.network.local:iscsi.lun1" âlogin

Please note that I merely split the line for display purposes. If all has gone well, you should be able to see the new device through fdisk: fdisk -l. You may see a new and empty device called /dev/sdb (if you already have one SCSI disk). This disk is ready for partitioning with fdisk, provisioning with mkfs and mounting on your root filesystem.

When you reboot, your iSCSI disks should be available without using the iscsiadm tool. The daemon processed that do this are controlled by the /etc/init.d/open-iscsi script.

What I presented here is fine for local, trusted networks. There is zero security in this configuration. There are all sorts of authentication schemes for targets and encryption options for the iSCSI traffic. Also, using a fake disk (i.e. a file) as a target will not give you very good performance on the host. I leave all of these enhancements as an exercise for the reader.

UPDATE: Here a link to the Microsoft iSCSI initiator for Windows XP and above.

«I think there is a world market for maybe five computers»

âFictional Quote by Thomas Watson

Last weekend, Apple's iPad went on sale in their retail stores. Coincidentally, my iPod classic (a 6 year old hand-me-down) had recently become nearly unusable due to hard drive errors (I told you this was a bad design years ago). Desiring a new MP3 device, I waddled into the Apple store in Nashua, NH. There were two armed security guards there and a gaggle of gawkers pawing at a table full of iPads. I moved deeper into the store, found an employee with a lot of gray hair (I'm not hip enough for the tattoo'ed set) and obtained a 32GB iPod Touch. Why on Earth would I choose an iPod over the fancy iPad? Let me illuminate the ways.

I want to promulgate an essentialist argument about purpose of three devices: iPad, iPod Touch and the Amazon Kindle. The Kindle (which I received as a Christmas present) is designed as an ebook reader, library and store front. That is, not only can you read books on it, but you can purchase new ones from Amazon and have them immediately downloaded to your device. Additionally, the Kindle comes with free 3G service so that you can access a low-resolution version of the Internet anywhere. This feature alone should scare Apple into a price/feature war with Amazon. Add a decent battery life and a daylight-readable display, you will quickly see that the Kindle's offering is excellent for those seeking an excellent ebook experience.

Enter the iPad. The iPad has a large color LCD screen and the Apple mobile OS. It does not come with any 3G service, but it does include wifi support. This makes it a large iPod Touch, but without the microphone headphones that come standard with the new Touch models. As a laptop, the iPad needs a keyboard, which is both proprietary and sold separately. As a gaming device, the iPad, with the built-in gyroscope and networking, will offer hours of casual gaming fun, but it won't kill the traditional gaming consoles. As an ebook reader, it does not compete well against the kindle. The iPad is significantly more expensive and worse on battery life. Also, you may not want to spend more of your time looking at yet another LCD screen for leisure.

The iPad looks a lot like a new kind of netbook. It is a general purpose computer ideally suited for causal computing tasks like web browsing, tweeting, and a game or two. In this capacity, I expect the iPad to meet with moderate success. It is prettier than the other netbooks, if a bit pricier. However, it is extremely portable (although not pocket-portable) and I expect to see iPad proliferate in cafes very soon.

And what of the now lowly iPod Touch? Why would anyone buy this little brother iPad now? There are two compelling features of the newer Touch models: size and the microphone headset. The Touch is essentially a very small general purpose device. As an MP3 player, I find it much harder to use than the older iPod classic, the iPod Nano and especially the Shuffle. Those devices are single-purposed: they play music and their interface is bent to this single task. Those devices are excellent. Don't believe me? Take an iPod Touch and try to get it to play a random selection of music. First, you have to hit the only button on the device. Then you use the touch pad to "unlock" the UI. Then you search for the button labelled "Music". Try not to get confused with the iTunes icon, which is what you'd click on a Mac OS X machine. Then you hit the Music button at the bottom only to get (perhaps) a list of songs. If you don't see a list of songs, you must press the "Songs" icon at the button of the app. Scroll to the top of this list and you'll see an area called Shuffle. It might occur to you to then press in the "Shuffle" area. Why no button? Buttons afford pressing. I though the Apple UI guys where supposed to be good at this kind of thing. If you get through all this, you'll get some music. And what if you want to skip ahead to a new song? If the Touch as gone to sleep, you might find it hard to get back to the one screen that has the song forward control (hint, your Touch needs to be upright, not on its side).

Try this same set of tasks on the other iPods and you'll see that those devices are optimized for playing and managing music.

This is all to say that I didn't buy the Touch as a music player and that I do not believe that it is a music player at all. It's the tiniest netbook on the market. I can and do actually read web sites with this thing. I can check my yahoo mail with it. I even use Skype on it. That's right, Skype. At least in my house within range of my wifi, I have a cheap iPhone (itself a netbook/phone hybrid).

Where does this leave our three devices? For my money, the Kindle is without peer for reading ebooks. As a netbook, it's not very good (but that is by design). The iPad is great for those looking for a netbook with great screen real estate. The Touch is a netbook for those who put a premium on weight and space. The other iPods are still the kings of portable music devices.

UDPATE: I just learned that I can shake the Touch to change to the next song. Fun UI, I admit, it's not exactly a visible UI element either.

«Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.»

âWarren Buffet

In the first part of this series, I illuminated what I believe to be the important first steps of electronic social media (that is, social groups created and maintained primarily through computers). In this conclusion, I trace how social media moved beyond the technically savvy and privileged to the rest of us.

The term World Wide Web is rarely used anymore and that's a shame. The Web, a system of interconnected HTML documents retrieved through the HTTP protocol, is mass transit system of nearly all modern electronic communication that travels over the Internet. I suppose its a kind of compliment that when most folks refer to the Web, they call it the "Internet" (or "netternet" or "interwebs"). Whatever it's called, the system that allowed for the creation and proliferation of web sites allowed for the next generation.

For many, the Web was a kind of Graphic User Interface to the Internet. In a sense, everything that had been invented for UNIX needed to be brought into the world of personal computers (including UNIX itself in the form of Linux and *BSD). Is it a surprise that the twenty year old unix utility came back in the form of AOL's Instant Message in the late nineties? Not to me. If an earlier generation had lived socially through email, there was now a younger generation that lived on IM or ICQ. Mobile phones, which already had SMS messaging, began supporting IM directly so that you could always text chat with your friends when when you were away from your computer. IM is mostly a 1-1 connection. That is, one person chating with only one other person. Another limitation of IM is that the conversation were private and generally impermanent. For private conversations, that's probably OK, but clearly there was a market for more.

While some folks were making dinner plans over IM, others were journaling their rage through weblogs. Weblogs, for those recently revived coma victims, are a form of website built to be updated with new content frequently. The writing staff of blogs can be as small as one person or as many as dozens (or thousands in the case of kuro5hin, slashdot, digg, metafilter, etc). What makes blogs social is the commenting system that allows readers to respond to particular blog posts. Moreover, bloggers will reference the posts of other blogs. Being web pages, blogs are long-term publications that can be referred to in the future through search engines. Blogs exploded in the first part of the first decade of the twenty first century and now (2010) look to seriously challenge and even replace a large number of traditional print media organizations. Of couse, someone needs to figure out how to incorporated an editorial staff into blogs at some point, but that's a different article.

2002 saw the quiet beginnings of websites that were something both less and more than blogs. Sites like Friendster and MySpace were designed for what I'll call "small updates." A user might upload a picture or a song along with a brief updated on what they were doing to a "profile page." User content was limited to one page. Rarely would these posts be longer than a few sentences.

The real value of these sites was that they allowed users to identify connections with other users on the system. This is the beginning of web-based social networks, which is a bit of a dehumanizing term. A network is a system of nodes connected by routes. In social networking, you are a node. Your value, at least to marketers, was the number of your connections rather than the content of your profile.

However, the value of social networks to users was to build a broadcast system to a community of your friends (i.e. trusted contacts). This notion is quiet powerful and would continue its evolution in a web site designed to bring together academics. That site is Facebook. Facebook took all of the elements of social media that had been developed in other site and made user status updates private (by default). This element of exclusivity at first seems paradoxical, but many user want to limit the scope of their broadcasting. Facebook provides an excellent vehicle for this.

I would like to note that the blogging site LiveJournal also has an interesting feature to limit the visibility of posts using "locks". LJ posts are generally publically visible, but locked posts are visible only to friends.

There seems to be a lot of mileage to be had by limiting the functionality of blogs. If Facebook limits the scope of broadcasting, Twitter limits the length of posts. Twitter is a bit like a UNIX system log. It receives short updates from multiple programs. Any UNIX admin will tell you the utility of reading the system log. It's a snapshot of the current state of the system. In the same way, Twitter is not a media of deep intellectually pondering. It's a system that captures the zeitgeist of its users.

Twitter and Facebook operate as very different social media engines. Facebook (and linkedIn for that matter) are tools that identify existing relationships. Twitter encourages browsing for new friends.

And that's where social media is today. The web expanding the reach of social networks by removing a lot of the technical requirements of its users. It's hard to see what the next step for social media will be. I suspect it will be in the realm of mobile devices. Perhaps some kind of location-based ad-hoc social network. Perhaps there is value is creating networks of networks. The future is now.

«Adhocracy is a type of organization being antonymous to bureaucracy. The term was first popularized in 1970 by Alvin Toffler, and has since become often used in the theory of management of organizations (particularly online organizations), further developed by academics such as Henry Mintzberg.»

âWikipedia

Electronic social media is not new, but the scale of it, perhaps is.

A recent OnPoint radio program talked about William Sims Bainbridge's, a social scientist, excersions into the World of Warcraft. Aside from a lot of old-manisms from the host, the show gave perhaps the most positive spin on the effect of this wildly popular MMORPG I've yet heard. After literally thousands of hours of play, Bainbridge reports what millions of people have already figured out: that humans in virtual worlds behave pretty much the same way they do in real life, but more so.

In meatspace, groups form around common goals or interests out of people in the local population. That is, the physical locality of people is a filter that will determine the size and composition of an interest group. Virtual worlds, of course, do not eliminate physicality entirely, but they do expand the definition of a locality. Even though you can have one million users from all across the planet together in one virtual space at once, the abstraction is a little leaky. Humans still need to sleep and the sun still needs twenty four hours to travel around the globe. Timezones and sleep schedules are the new locality filter for "real-time" group communication.

For grumpy old men like myself, electronic social media has been around for decades. Twitter and Facebook may be grabbing headlines today for creating a space in which millions interact daily, but that activity has been going on almost since the Internet went online. Below is a thumbnail sketch of the evolution of electronic communication that acted as social media.

Table: A Chronological List of Social Media

1. chat/wall
2. uucp/usernet/email
3. BBS
4. IRC
5. IM
6. Weblogs
7. Friendster/Myspace
8. Facebook/Twitter

In the pleistocene era of computing (the 1970s), users typically shared one computer system that often hadden upwards of 8MB of RAM. This multiuser systems (UNIX, VMS, MVS) had ways of sending messages to other logged in users on the system. These programs, like the UNIX utilities chat and wall, went a long way towards users seeing computers as places of social activity. Of course, the total worldwide population of computer users in the 70s was probably in low thousands. Social activity was limited to users on the same system.

Not long after (let's call it the 1980s), the ability to send messages to users on different systems came with the advent of unix-to-unix-copy (uucp) and email. These utilities helped make 1-1 connections among users of different computer installations. The system the collected emails into a taxonomic forum made its participants feel like there was one global electronic world. That system was Internet News or Usenet. The way people interacted on Usenet continues to be an excellent model for how people behave on all subsequent electronic media.

The growth of the Internet in the 80s and early 90s was happening in universities, government agencies and large corporations. However, the general public was dimly aware of this growth at all there was no easy (or interesting) way to bring this connectivity to the consumer. However, the sales of personal computers was booming and many unwashed savages were snapping up these devices to create spreadsheets and terrible dot-matrix printed flyers. If (generally speaking) the Internet was unavailable to these early computer users, modems were not. Small operators were setting Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) on their PCs and letting anyone dial into them. That is, you the PC owner had to find the phone number of a BBS, get some modem/terminal software, dial up the BBS and pay standard phone rates for the call as you were connected to the system. It all sounds barbaric now, but it was, at the time, cutting edging and exciting as a cyberpunk movie. I know this because that's when I began to get interested into becoming a programmer.

BBS created a very strong sense of community and ownership in its users. Remember that users committed real money to their BBS experience, so bad behavior was not long tolerated by the SysOp. As fun as BBS were, they had some fundamental limitations. The size of the online population was limited to the number of modems and phone lines the sysop had. Users might be allowed to upload static content, but not dynamic. These issues would be addressed by a different system that emerged in the mid-nineties.

As much as I'd like to present a neat timeline of descrete evolutionary steps for social media, that's not really how the real world works. While PC users were exchanging "documents" about UFOs and Roswell on BBS, university Internet users were chatting away in Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels. Channels were ad-hoc virtual areas where nominally specific topics were discussed. The beauty of IRC is that it was a distributed system that allowed users from any Internet node to connect and chat. For me, IRC is the first modern social media that has all of the characterics that are often ascribed to the web based tools of 2008-2010. IRC was realtime, distributed chatting. If you wanted to know what was going on in another part of the world, IRC was often a good place to hang out. Don't believe me? IRC was used to report on the 1991 Soviet coup when all other media was blacked out. I'm waiting for Twitter to top that.

Unfortunately, IRC is mostly a command line application and its popularity was often limited to somewhat tech-savvy people. It is my hope that history will remember it more kindly that it currently does.

In the conclusion of this article, I'll discuss how electronic social media swelled its ranks from thousands of users to millions.

Comment spam has returned to Taskboy, but this time, it's personal.

The first version of comment spam appeared to be from a program that simply crawled sites and looked to hook into the comment systems of most blogs. The content of these comments was clearly mechanically produced and made little sense. Technologies like CAPTCHA have mostly eliminated that sort of noise.

I know get messages that are either written by the world's greatest ELISA bot or by poorly paid folks with computers. The content of these human generated messages are often on point and could be attempts to participate in a dialog. However, there is always a URL form that points to a business associated with the posts.

Some of these comments I post. Some I do not. I did not want to unfairly reject a comment. However, I'm pretty sure I see the pattern now and will be less lenient in the future.

Doc Searls points out our growing dependency on Google. In brief, he equates Google with a kind of free public utility that provides the following functionality:

• Maps/Satellite data
• Search
• Mobile phones (via Android)

To that list, I would add the following features on which many people and companies have come to depend:

• Advertising (via AdWords)
• Ad-based venue (via AdSense)
• Email and Instant Messaging (via Gmail)
• Voice Mail/Phone routing (via Talk)
• New aggregation (via News)

Searls, with a "me too" from Dave Winer, declaim that Google has become "too big to fail." They worry that Google, fattened and dependent on its advertising engine, is vulnerable to economic bubbles in advertising. They worry that Google is in a bubble right now.

I do not think this is the case. Google no doubt enjoys quite a bit of revenue from advertising right now. However, no one outside of Google has a complete accounting of the company's revenue. If Google survived the recessions of 2001-2003 and 2008-2010, there is good reason to believe that they will weather future economic storms.

However, Doc Searls points to a more immediate danger that Google presents to consumers: that of the digital monoculture. Google rarely extracts money from users directly. There are only a handful of subscription services offered by them. However, the user base for Gmail is enormous. The same can be said for their advertising services. What would our online life be like if Google went offline tomorrow?

Just looking at one service, Gmail, is illustrative of the scope of the problem. Many companies have outsourced their mail handling to entirely to Google. Recall that in the 1990's, IT staffs spent a considerable amount of time and money setting up corporate email systems. Although the largest companies still do this, many simply outsource this tasks and reap significant savings and reliability over in-house mail systems. Without Google, a very large number of companies and people would not be able to conduct business. Sure, there would be work-arounds: alternate email accounts, telephones, etc. However, this distruption would cost real and measurable dollars.

Perhaps the most immediate effect would be the loss of Google's wonderful, if easily forgotten, search function. To remind those readers recently recovered from a coma, the current neologism for searching online for something is "googling." Imagine the sort of a day you would have if your browser returned a 404 missing page error when accessing http://www.google.com/. That would not be a salad day at all.

The open source community, of which both Searls and Winer are associated, has longed battled against digital monocultures (e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc.). Consumers usually benefit from choice (although not always [remember the mess of the home computer market in the 1980s]). Healthy competition promotes innovation and cost-savings. It also creates a healthier ecosystem in which the failure of one entity does not threaten the survival of everyone.

To this end, consumers of free digital products ought to consider how much they depend on these services. I practice what I preach. I pay for Yahoo Mail Plus, which is $20 a year. It's a fair deal: I see no ads and I can use POP mail. That's pretty short money for a service that has yet to have a outage more than 5 minutes in three years. The same goes for my blog hosted on bluehost.com. For $7 a month, I get shell access to very reasonable Linux environment. Of course, there are plenty of free choices for blog hosting these days, but I need to control my content and the context in which it appears. Free services can close shop without notice and there is little consumers can do to retrieve their content.

The dangers of monoculture become readily apparent after a failure. In groups, humans are not noted for their ability to successfully anticipate future disasters. It seems that now, we don't even recall past calamities all that well. One would think that the near fatal collapse of traditional lending institutions who participated in rank speculation would produce a rapid and perhaps onerous regulatory response. However, that has not yet proven to be the case nearly two years after the shock.

From a strictly selfish perspective, I would love to see Google fail completely tomorrow. Business opportunities abound in chaos and fortune favors the bold.

UPDATE: It looks like no one at Yale reads my blog.

I tweeted yesterday about my centos 5 linux box losing sound (and frankly X, but that's another story). I tried to use the sound card detector (system-config-soundcard) to find the card again, but it silently failed (typical). The Linux sound howto is over nine years old, so that's pretty useless. What to do?

Well, I turned to my old friends lsmod, dmesg and strace. I could see tha there were kernel sound modules loaded. I could knew that I had configuration that was working. So I issued the following command:

# strace mpg123 /path/to/mp3file

I got quite a bit of output, but the relevant line was this:

open("/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p", O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

And sure enough, this is what was in my /dev/snd directory:

[root@durgan snd]# ls controlC0 hwC1D2 pcmC1D0c pcmC1D1p timer controlC1 pcmC0D0c pcmC1D0p seq

Oh look! There's no pcmC0D0p file. What to do. I could try to create the missing dev file, but I just symlinked the pcmC1D0p to pcmC0D0p.

And yes, this horrible, horrible hack worked like a charm.

What happened to delete this device file? Why couldn't I make the system re-detect and re-initialize the sound system? It's stupid, stupid user issues like this that have plagued linux since 1995 and show no signs of getting better today. This is why you don't see a lot of linux notebooks or games.

Increasingly, search engines like Google and Yahoo are supporting a kind of HTML markup schema called microformats. Microformats are a kind of an embedded document inside a standard web page (which can be thought of as a sort of macroformat, if you will).

There are two flavors of mircoformats: one for HTML (which introduces no new elements or attributes) and one for XHTML (which adds a few new attributes, but no new tags). The proposed RDFa standard can be thought of as the flavor of microformats for XHTML, since it is based on the RDF XML format. The reality is the there are two groups of people (RDFa, microformats) working in the same space, so there is overlap. However for now, the HTML vs. XHTML partitioning works well to categorize these two embedded document efforts.

There are a few things you can do with these embedded syntaxes. If you regularly review businesses or products (like yelp.com does), you might consider using the hReview mircoformat to identitfy parts of your review, as shown in the following snippet:

<div class="hreview"> <span class="item"> <span class="fn">Taskboy Feed Bag</span> </span> Reviewed by <span class="reviewer">Joe Johnston</span> on <span class="dtreviewed"> <span clsas="value-title" title="2010-02-07"/>Feb 7, 2010 </span> <span class="summary">Terrific news source for free</span> <span class="description">The Feed Bag RSS aggregator on Taskboy has replace Google news as one stop shop to get the news of what's going on in tech and politics now.</span> <span class="rating">4.5</span> </div>

As you can see, that's a lot of semantic markup for so little visible text. Google can pull this code apart and display it under the link for the product or service discussed.

In addition to reviews, Google and Yahoo understand at least four other species of embedded documents: people/businesses, products, events, and video. Because there are two standards bodies at work, there are microformats and RDFa specs for each. The following table summarizes this with links to give examples of these embedded documents.

• Reviews: hReview (microformat) v:Review (RDFa)
• People/Business: hCard/vCard (microformat) v:Person (RDFa)
• Events: hCalendar (microformat)
• Product: hProduct (microformat) v:Product (RDFa)
• Video: Facebook Share (microformat) Yahoo! SearchMonkey (for video) (RDFa)

To test your embedded document, try Google's microformat tool.

I have a few concerns about microformats. The first is that it requires a lot of additional markup. I understand that a blogging system can create a form to collect these discrete features, but it still seems like a lot of work for casual use. The second concern I have is that microformats reuse the class attribute that is normally used for CSS. This creates a whole bunch of reserved words to avoid for class names in your site's CSS. Perhaps its not that big a deal, but I do not like namespace conflicts. I prefer the RDFa spec, which simply introduces new attributes (typeod, property, etc.) specific to its purpose. That seems a lot cleaner to me. However, the various RDFa formats are not as well documented as their microformat counterparts. As in all things, "good enough" often trumps "clean design."

There is no doubt that embedded documents are a bit of a moving target. I don't expect the formats for things already defined to change, but more objects will be described by new specifications.

I'm currently developing a social media application using PHP and sqlite. I don't know if I'll deploy with sqlite, but for development, it works well. I have two CVS sandboxes that I work in for this project. One of these in on my macbook (which comes with sqlite-enabled PHP) and an Ubuntu virtual machine. There are a few gotchas to be aware of when using sqlite in this kind of environment.

Write-protected directories

In other RDBM systems like mysql or postgres, the is a server process that is responsible for reading and writing to the database disk files. With sqlite, this isn't the case. If you're using sqlite through PHP, then the process owner running the PHP must be able to read and write to the location of the sqlite database file. This requirement gets a little more complex when you are running PHP through apache which has its own ideas about directory security.

In must apache setups, your PHP scripts will not be able to write in the web-accessible "document root". You will not be able to keep your sqlite database file in the document root. If you try, you will find errors on INSERT and UPDATES about "database file is locked." However, it is foolish from a security point of view to keep your database file in a web-accessbile directory anyway.

This particular problem hit me hard on Mac OS X. Once user directories are enabled in the apache configuration, your Sites directory becomes a document root. You won't be able to keep your sqlite files in that directory or any subdirectory under it. Instead, created a ~/tmp directory and keep the sqlite database file there.

SQLite version skew: apache/shell

Because sqlite is an embedded system, it is compiled into program you are using. If you are using PHP, you can run into the following issue. I use PHP from the command line all the time. When I create the database, I run a PHP script from the shell to do this. Unfortunately, the command line PHP and the version of PHP compiled into apache may not be the same. Further, the apache PHP may not be compiled with the same version of sqlite. This is the case on Mac OS X. What a mess!

To get around this, always create your sqlite databases through apache/PHP. You will run into far fewer issues this way.

Changing the schema requires an apache restart

Recall that apache is a pre-forking server. If you change the schema of your sqlite database while apache's running, you could get an error in PHP that "schema has changed." Whatever SQL statement you were attempting to run will fail.

From the "don't do that" school of medicine comes this technical advice. If you need to change the schema of an sqlite database, shut down apache first, update the database and restart apache.

I hope this post helps others avoid the mistakes I made.

Facebook will shortly release a tool called HipHop for enhancing the performance of PHP. My understanding of the tool is that it compiles PHP code into C++ which is then compiled into a system native executable. While I have no doubt that this tool does produce significant speed gains over apache/PHP, I do think one needs to be aware of the trade-offs of this kind of system. After all, this isn't the first time a trick like this has been used for a dynamic language.

C++ and PHP are very different languages. I'm not talking about syntax, but how source code is handled. In PHP, the source code is turned into op codes that the PHP interpreter understands. The interpreter knows how to the operating system perform these op codes. In C++, source code is compiled into assembler which is then linked into a system executable which can be run from the shell. Compiled code runs faster than interpreted code for a number of reasons, but the most important is that compiled code is closest to native assembler which essentially is the op code system that the host CPU uses to make stuff happen.

The problem with compiling PHP into C++ is that you lose all the wonderful dynamic features of PHP since these cannot be easily or efficiently translated automatically into C++ source code. The very dynamic nature of PHP (or Perl or Ruby or Python, etc) is what makes these languages accelerate programmer productivity. I think facebook will see this performance hit later.

Let's not forget that Moore's law of CPU power often solves a great deal of performance issues. Hardware is always cheaper than developer time and less prone to bugs.

I favor architectures that take advantage of Moore's law and use horizontal scaling and commodity solutions over fancier tricks that require specialized talent (like erlang). I might suggest caching the opcodes that the PHP interpreter generates and simply running those. This is the essence of the Zend server and how apache/mod_perl/Apache::Registry work. Sure, you don't get quite the performance of compiled code but you'll still see a noticable boost. I believe PHP does some level of this kind of caching right now.

It's true that one can do amazing feats by being clever, but clever doesn't scale (unless you're Google).

An interesting chart comparing various PHP frameworks. I'm not sure that I can read it correctly. It seems to imply that Zend and CakePHP are the most popular frameworks.

Both frameworks are free, but Zend is clearly optimized for the Zend server platform, which isn't free. Also, I can't help thinking that the audience is somewhat different for these two. CakePHP seems aimed at the more opensource, DIY crowd while Zend is clearly pointed to the enterprise IT crowd. While there is overlap, you can see that Zend is a commercial venture.

I have very mixed emotions about using frameworks. On the hand, frameworks deliver huge dollops of functionality right out of the box. This accelerates the completion of many IT projects. On the other, you get locked into another group's development schedule and, to some extent, the architectural choices they make. Projects built with these tools also expose themselves to bugs and security holes originating in the frameworks. Finally, you end up having to trust or vet the code in the framework.

For an inward-facing intranet product, I think frameworks are great. I'm not sure I'd want to launch something like twitter or facebook with one.

There is a well-know design pattern called publish-subscribe or the Observer model. The problem this model attempts to solve is one in which a object requires one or more parties to act on it when it changes to a particular state. A concrete example of this event handlers in GUIs including the DOM. Actions made be associated with button presses.

The Observer model seperates the subject from the parties (observers) that act on it. Observers register the interest with the subject. When the subject changes to the desired state, it notifies each of the registered observers.

In PHP, a subject class might be modeled like this:

class Subject { private $Q = array(); function Attach($O) { array_push($this->Q, $O); } function Detach($O) { for($i=0; $i < count($Q); $i++) { if ($Q[$i] == $O) { array_splice($this->Q, $i, 1); break; } } } function Notify() { foreach($this->Q as $O) { $O->Update($this); } } }

The Attach() and Detach() methods are the API by which Observers register or unregister their interest in a Subject object. When the subject changes into an interesting state, its Notify() method is called. This method in turn calls the Observer Update() method with a reference to the current Subject object. An Observer class might look like this:

class Observer { function Update($S) { // Do something interesting } }

As you can see, an Observer need only implement one well-known method, Update(). This arrangement nicely decouples the Subject from the Observers.

There may be times when a less formal, more functional mechanism is desirable. What if you want just want certain actions to happen on an object when an interesting state obtains? You might use what I call an Action queue to do this. An Action Queue is simply an array of function references that are called by an object at an interesting time. Here's what an Action queue might look like:

class MyClass { private $Q = array(); function Attach($name, $func) { $this->Q[$name] = $func; } function Detach($name) { unset($this->Q[$name]); } function Notify() { foreach ($this->Q as $n=>$func) { $func($this); } } }

As you can see, there is no need for an Observer class. Bits of functionality created with create_function() can be attached ad hoc to this class, as the following snipet shows:

$appender = create_function('$obj', 'return "Got => ".\$obj'); $MyClassObj->Attach("append", $appender);

Because these code bits are anonymous, an arbitary name is required during the Attach phase in the event that you might want to remove the behavior later.

Invoke search and place as normal (M-%), enter the text to be replaced, enter the replacing character using the following chart:

• Newline(\n): C-qC-j
• Tab(\t): C-qC-i
• Carriage return(\r): C-qC-m

See the pattern? C-q is an escape sequence and C-[char] is the position in the alphabet of the ASCII offset of the replacement character. OK, perhaps that's a little tangled. But now you know.

This article explores the mechanisms by which PHP session handling can be customized to work with non-standard datastore like SQL datbases using the PHP Data Object (PDO) interface.

To frame the context of this discussion, let's briefly look at how the HTTP protocol is designed. HTTP is a stateless client/server protocol. That is an HTTP client, like a web browser, makes request for a resource on a server, which the server responds with. From the server's point of view, each request has no relationship with previous requests. For web application developers, this is a challenge. Often applications need to keep state information associated with a particular user. An application state that's associated with a user is called a session.

What is the default PHP way of addressing this?

Being that PHP was designed for web applications, it's not surprising to learn that it offers built-in support for sessions.

A typical "vanilla" use of PHP sessions looks like this:

<?php session_start(); $_SESSION["count"]++; session_write_close(); ?> <p>Count: <?=$_SESSION["count"]?></p>

A quick note on session.auto_start and session_register(). You can make PHP start a session when any PHP is loaded by setting the "session.auto_start" attribute to in php.ini or by invoking ini_set(). However, I do not recommend this for applications that have named users. Sessions should begin only after a user has authenticated. PHP also can make session variables global scalars. This too is a bad idea. Global variables in general are a bad engineering practice. PHP's ability to make GET/POST parameters global variables too creates an opportunity for malicious users to pass in arbitrary session values. Instead, use the super global $_SESSION array to store session variables.

By default, PHP can pass a session ID in URLs or through HTTP cookies. Cookies offer the most transparent and arguably safer mechanism. Also by default, PHP stores session information in flat files on the web server. On a shared web host, this backing store presents a security problem as the files are often stored in the communal /tmp directory. Sessions in flat files also present a challenge to scaling a web application beyond the single host. By storing session information in an SQL system, a user can be shunted to any number of web servers that have access to the session database.

The authors of PHP have defined a simple procedural callback mechanism that allows developers to use any desirable data storage mechanism. Up to six session callback functions can be overridden to customize the way session data is stored using the session_set_save_handler(). These six callbacks are: open, close, read, write, destroy and garbage collection. Let's look at what these callbacks are responsible for.

When the session begins, the open callback is invoked to initialize the datastore. This can mean that a file is opened and its handle stored in a global variable. The open callback is passed two strings: a path and the session name. Both of these parameters can be controlled by the developer. However for our database backing store, these values will be unused.

The close callback is called when the session has ended. All global resources, like filehandles, should be freed at this point. The close callback receives no additional parameters.

The read callback is invoked when the opened session attempts to retrieve previously stored session data. It is passed the current session ID. It should return a serialized data string that it was passed when the write callback was last called for this session. You are not responsible for serializing or deserializing session data, which is a pity. There are some issues with the serialization method used by PHP sessions.

The write callback is invoked when the session is ready to be closed. It is passed a session ID and a serialized data string. The callback must store this information is a place where it can retrieved later.

The destroy callback is invoked when the session is to be explicitly destroyed. It is passed a session ID. Session destruction often happens when a user explicitly signs out of an application.

Finally, the garbage collection callback is invoked automatically by the PHP session mechanism to clean-up old sessions. It is called with a maximum life value expressed in seconds. All sessions older than that value should be destroyed.

Even though this session customization mechanism is expressed as function callbacks, I find that it is architecturally cleaner to wrap up session handling into a static class. It puts all the callbacks and static members into one descrete namespace that can be more easily consumed by other web applications. Please note that much of the error checking as been left out.

First, you will need create the following table in a mysql database (which is called 'myapp' in this code):

CREATE TABLE sessions ( id int auto_increment not null primary key, d text, updated int );

<? class Sessions { public static $Db = null; public static $SessionName = "MySession"; public static function Open($path, $session_name) { if (Sessions::$Db == null) { $dsn = 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=myapp' Sessions::$Db = new PDO($dsn, 'db_user', 'db_pass'); } return True; } public static function Close() { if (Sessions::$Db != null) { Sessions::$Db = null; } return True; } public static function Read($sid) { $sql = "SELECT * FROM sessions WHERE id=?"; $sth = Sessions::$Db->prepare($sql); $sth->execute($sid); $tbl = $sth->fetchAll(); return $tbl[0]["d"]; } public static function Write($sid, $data) { $vals = array("d"=>$data, "updated" => time()); $sql = "SELECT COUNT(id) FROM sessions WHERE id=?"; $sth = Session::$Db->prepare($sql); $sth->execute($sid); $tbl = $sth->fetchAll(); if ($tbl[0][0] < 1) { // New session $vals["id"] = $sid; $sql = "INSERT INTO sessions ('id','d','updated') WHERE (?,?,?)"; $sth = Sessions:$Db->prepare($sql); $sth->execute($vals['id'], $vals['d'], $vals['updated']); } else { // Existing session $sql = "UPDATE sessions SET d=?,updated=? WHERE id=?"; $sth = Sessions::$Db->prepare($sql); $sth->execute($vals['d'], $vals['updated'], $vals['id']); } } return True; } public static function Destroy($sid) { if (strlen($sid) > 0) { $sql = "DELETE FROM sessions WHERE id=?"; $sth = Sessions:$Db->prepare($sql); $sth->execute($sid); } return True; } public static function garbageCollect($max_life) { $threshold = time() - $max_life; $sql = "DELETE FROM sessions WHERE updated < $threshold"; Sessions:$Db->query($sql); return True; } public static function initCallbacks() { $rc = session_set_save_handler( "Sessions::Open", "Sessions::Close", "Sessions::Read", "Sessions::Write", "Sessions::Destroy", "Sessions::garbageCollect" ); if ($rc === False) { Utils::Logger("Could not set session handlers."); } $cookie_args = array(60*60*24*14, // Lifetime in seconds "/", // Domain path ".example.com", // Domain where valid False, // Send cookie over unsecure connections False, // httponly ); session_set_cookie_params($cookie_args); return True; } } Sessions::initCallbacks(); ?>

This static class defines the session save handlers as static method. When the file is included, it calls another static method to install the session handlers. Most of this code is pretty straight forward, thanks to the placeholder facility of PDO. I would note that the session table's updated column is a unix timestamp rather than a mysql datetime type. This makes the GC reaping code much easier to write.

A note about using auto incrementing IDs for sessions identifiers. It is considered poor security to use an easily predictable sequence for session IDs since an attack can attempt to hijack legitimate sessions by guessing this number. PHP provides a uniqid() function which is much better suited for session IDs.

As I begin my descent into the arcane and mystical realms of Search Engine Optimization, I have heard that some search engines prefer static-appearing content to dynamic. That is, a page with a .pl, .php, or .asp would be spidered less often or ranked lower than a page ending in .htm or .html. Since search engine companies are secretive in how they they spider and rank pages, I cannot say with certainty that this is true. However, this behavior is a widely accepted prejudice.

It is clear that dynamic pages ofter many, many adventages over static content. The most clear advantage is the use of common headers and footers to create a consistent and easily changed look and feel to a web site. It is unlikely that web designers will move away from dynamic templating, but how can they create these valuable .html files for search engines?

One way is to create a process that runs through all the dynamic content on one's site and produce static HTML files. When I worked for O'Reilly Media, that's how the catalog pages were generated. But this solution would not work for pages that are updated daily or hourly. The better solution is to simply call your dynamic pages .htm or .html. Since you might actually want a static page now and again, perhaps we'll focus on .htm.

For the youngsters in the crowd, .htm is the extension for HTML files as they appeared in earlier versions of Windows (like Windows 95). Back then, there was still concern about backward compatibility with the DOS file naming schema (use wikipedia for the gory details). However, this three letter extension is no longer needed and rarely used.

There are at least two methods for dynamically redirectly incoming HTTP requests to a differently named resource on the web server. Again, the scenario is you have a bunch of .php files but you want the public facing URLs to end .html. Apache has the much-feared Rewrite directive that uses regular expressions on requests to find the local resource to serve. An example of this that might appear in an .htaccess file is:

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule (+)\.htm$ $1.php

This silently redirects all requests for any .htm file to the similarly named .php file. But I don't like this solution for two reasons. First, regular expressions are easy to mess up and can be hard to debug. Second, apache has to do this small amount of work for every request. I say, use the filesystem itself to make the magic happen. Enter the symbolic link.

Symlinks are available on Unix and Mac OS X. Simply link you .php to .htm files:

$ ln -sv index.php index.htm

Then add a the .htm to your PHP handler.

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm

This symlink technique reduces the work on apache allowing it more capacity to serve pages than the rewrite trick. How much more effecient this trick is, I can't say. I can will note that rewrite rules fall into the category of "action at a distance," with is a software engineering term meaning that the mechanism that causes something to happen isn't is an obvious place. With symlinks, any new coder will be able to find index.htm on the web server and see that it points to index.php. This is not the case with rewrite rules.

Any time I can make the OS do work instead of apache, I do. OS-level activities are often faster and more effecient than apache, so take advantage of these services when you can.

For those looking for a reasonable emacs mode for PHP work, consider this project. Simply find the php-mode.el file in the download and add the following to your .emacs file:

(load "/path/to/php-mode.el")

Replace "/path/to" with something appropriate for your system.

Now when you edit .php files, you'll get proper indenting and syntax coloring.

Lucky for you, both my Tic-Tac-Toe game and State Secrets work on Wii through Opera. Enjoy!

First, please find the track called Blammo. It's a mid-tempo indie rocker. I like the way the drums came out.

Next, I present the unfinished concept album called Tom Dashing that I attempted to do for the RPM Challenge. Only one track is complete. The others are in progress, but I doubt I'll finish them.

Recently, Slashdot covered a story about how netbios host discovery can be hijacked. While this has many obvious and grave security concerns, this defeat also an opportunity for enhancing the netbios protocol.

From the turning-a-flaw-into-a-feature department, I'd like to suggest that a new netbios service could be designed to masquerade or proxy netbios hosts that would not otherwise be available on a given netbios network. Let's look at each one of these activities in turn.

NetBIOS Masquerading

Imagine a medium sized company with a file server that hosts read-only only material. This is a fairly common configuration. The netbios protocol requires each machine to have a unique name on the network. That means that everyone in the company who desires access to the network share must connect to this one file server. But what if you had a service that allowed many file server to respond to same netbios name? That would allow the file server load to be spread across multiple machines in a somewhat random manner akin to DNS round-robin load balancing.

NetBIOS Proxying

NetBIOS does not allow routing. When a host is sought by workstation, that host must be on the same network segment as the seeker. However, if you built a netbios proxy service, a host that has access to a desirable resouce on non-routable network could proxy requests for it on another network. Although proxying has overhead, it might be a great solution for admins trying to merge two companies' networks.

It is possible, I think, with existing tools on Linux to do these kinds of services with a little hacking. The idea of exploiting this exploit for something useful appealed to me.

Also I used my linux box to transfer the files to kindle. It appears as a typical usb device which masquerades as a a scsi disk. Meh.

Merry Christmas, from 1996.

As is my tradition, I post a sort of year-end evaluation of my life around my birthday. This year is no exception.

I was on a holiday sojourn in Brooklyn this year when I turned 38. By weird chance, I was but a few doors away from John Hodgman's home. I did not see the nerd hero and fellow Massachusetts native in person, but I did detect his home's WiFi network. How do I know this? Because his network is very clearly marked.

This year was a transition for me and I suppose many people. I lost my long-time job with Leostream, a company I helped launch. That was the first job from which I was ever let go. Technically, I was laid off. Had the economy been better, I don't think there would have been a reduction in force. But, for every door that closes, a new one opens.

I have not been idle during this time. I have done some contracting and have attempted to launch my own software company. Although that failed, I did learn how to write a formal business plan. I have been revitalizing my technical skills, which had become narrowly focused during my Leostream years on virtualization. That lead to two restructures of the taskboy.com site and a few new public utilities. I have become interested in video production using python. And I have some ideas for next year that I'm very excited about.

Sally and I have essentially finished renovating the interior of our home. I adore where I live and whom I live with. I'm an extraordinarily lucky fellow. If I've had some setbacks, I am still very far ahead of the game. And the future is an unwritten book.

The story caused a sensation when published and remains in print as of 2009. Revelations about the book's origin have caused much doubt as to its authenticity and factual accounts, and the publishers have listed it as a work of fiction since at least the mid-late 1300s. Although it is still published under the byline "Anonymous," press interviews and copyright records suggest that it is largely or wholly the work of its purported editor, Beatrice Sparks. Some of the days and dates referenced in the book put the timeline from 2012 until 1970.

The above text is from the wikipedia entry on the book Go Ask Alice as that page appears tonight. As you might guess, most of this entry is a farce. It's a bit of digital graffiti or info da-da that makes some chortle.

I present this here as a warning to all researchers who use only single sources of reference.

The green bean casserole is a mid-century staple on many holiday tables. Casseroles in the 50s were promoted by soup manufacturers as a kind of labor saving device for the modern house wife. Using a can a soup as a base, a wonderful dish could be created with a few other common ingredients and an oven. When done correctly, a cook could easily impress her family with the results.

As Alton Brown demonstated on his Good Eats show, casseroles can be made of almost anything. They are a good way to clean out your fridge of left-overs.

What both Brown and I object to about most casserole recipes is the use of canned soup. While I don't mind canned soup for straight-up fast food, I want more fine-grained control of the elements of my casseroles (like salt) than these off the shelf products allow.

Many soups and sauces are really easy to make. The classic recipe for green bean casserole calls for cream of mushroom soup. This is nothing more than a bechemal sauce infused with aromatics and sauted mushrooms. And a bechmal sauce can be as simple as rue (butter + flour) and milk!

I present my green bean casserole as a tasty, but simple twist on the mid-century classic. Enjoy!

Hardware:

• 1 large sauce or saute pan
• 1 8x8 casserole dish (or moral equivalent)
• Whisk or fork
• Wooden spoon

Software:

• 2 cups of milk
• 1/4 cup (2 oz.) of flour
• 4 oz. of unsalted butter
• Salt and pepper
• Package of crimini mushrooms (~ 10 oz.)
• 1 shalot
• 1 medium onion (yellow or white)
• 1/2 lb. of green beans
• 1/2 lb. of yellow waxy beans
• 1 can (8-12 oz.) fried onions

Preparation: (15 minutes)

Rinse off beans. Remove stems/ends. Cut into halves. Blanch beans in boiling water for 3-5 minutes. Shock beans in ice water to stop cooking.

Slice mushrooms. Dice shalot. Cut onion into slices of half circles (or simply dice).

Starting the sauce: (10 minutes)

In sauce pan over medium-low heat, add 1 oz. of butter. After butter melts, add shalots and onions. Add a good pinch of salt. Sweat these aromatics for 5-10 minutes or until translucent. Stir every minute or two to prevent burning.

Move aromatics to the edges of the pan. Add another ounce of butter to the center. Add a handful of mushrooms to the center. Every 2 minutes, move the cooked mushrooms to the edge. Add more mushrooms/butter as needed. Do not crowd pan.

Making the rue: (10 minutes)

When all mushrooms are cooked, move all food in pan to one side, add the rest of the butter. When melted, stir in flour with a whisk. Ensure all the flour becomes saturated with butter to form a paste or loose dough.

Finish the sauce:

Add the milk to the pan. Increase the heat to medium. Stir to integrate the rue and the milk. With heat and stiring, the sauce should thicken to a chowder or alfredo like consistency in about 5 minutes. Do not let the sauce boil or it will break. Add salt and pepper to taste. You will need more salt.

At this point, you have a mighty fine Cream of Mushroom soup. If soup is what you want, you might thin this out with more milk.

Finish the casserole: (35 minutes)

Add the beans to the soup, stiring as needed to ensure even distribution. Let the soup simmer gently for about 5 minutes.

Grease the casserole dish with butter. Pour in soup. Evenly spinkle fried onions over the top. Bake casserole at 425F for 30 minutes.

After that time, remove from oven and let stand for 10 minutes. Laddle out portions. Repeat as needed.

I recently finished reading Douglas Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts from O'Reilly Media. This slender book cannot be considered a complete reference guide to Javascript, nor a primer on programming. The author mostly avoids discussing how the language works in web browsers, the natural habitat of Javascript.

Instead, this book is meant to introduce a subset of the language that the author believes to be the most useful to the reader and the least likely to cause harm. If this seems like presumptuous concept for a book, you're mostly right. Javascript is best used in small doses only at need. However, as a author of the Javascript Object Notation format, Crockford does have the bona fides to make such recommendations. As it turns out, many of those recommendations are worth following.

The book clocks in at about 145 pages and ten chapters. Seven of those chapters introduce the major components of the language: grammar, objects, functions, inheritance, arrays, regular expressions and methods. As I said, this book is not for novices, but one could (maybe) pick up the language from these chapters. If one is already familiar with the language, Crockford does provide some valuable insights into how the language actually works as opposed to how most of us expect the language to work. Of particular note are the sections on objects, functions and regular expressions.

Chapter 10 is a bit of let down. It's call "Beautiful Features." After reading 100 pages of syntax and commentary, I expected to have a rather lenghty exposition of the wonderful things that can be done in the subset of javascript previously described. However, that is not what this two page chapter is about. Instead, this is a sort of conclusion with some hand waving. There is meat in the appendices that follow. Perhaps this chapter was originally all of the appendices concatenated together and the editors split them. That sort of thing does happen.

Throughout the book, Crockford blithely offers such commentary on Javascript like "[That all object properties are public] is a serious design error in the language" or "Because of a design error, arguments is not really an array." The pedantic voice of the author will grate on some reader's nerves. The tech world is full of such writers. If this affectation can be ignored, there is useful content here that will demystify javascript's weird functional, classless object system, it's prototypical inheritance scheme and it's somewhat weird function parameter access. But frankly, I was expecting a book a lot more like Pike's The Practice of Programming but in a javascript context.

Welcome to the new design of Taskboy!

Over the years, I've changed the layout on this site a few times. On the great constraints on my choice of layouts is that I'm no graphic artist. I cannot product graphics that look reasonable for love or money. What I can do is try to make smart organizational choices and bring a minimalist sensability to the layout.

This redesign taught me a lot about XHTML, a standard I've pretty much ignored until now. Proponents of XHTML will tell you that there is freedom in the constraints it imposes. I do know that I gave up some functionality that seemed to be fine for 4 versions of HTML just to obtain XHTML validation.

As I've mentioned, I've lately woken up to the idea of unobtrustive javascript/CSS design. CSS 2 is so widely supported now that it is time to put the old TABLE tag in semi-retirement. The fact that I was able to re-architect The Feed Bag using only DIVs is no small victory. (Note to self: perhaps each row should be a UL?).

However, before I sing the praises of XHTML further, let me chime in very late on the quirks I encountered. These annoyances were so pronounced that my wife complained that I was getting too cranky. I'm an old man.

This list is neither complete nor exhaustive, but represents the pain points as I remember them.

Item 1: XHTML docs do not look like XML docs

The target of this rant is really the way modern browsers work and can be summed up in two words: Quirks mode. To maintain "backward compatibility" with existing (crappy) web sites, some browsers have a mode of reacting to HTML in way that isn't compliant with standards. While this may not sound like such a bad thing, there are times when quirks mode kicks in unexpectedly.

For instance, all XHTML docs are XML docs. All XML docs are supposed to start with the declaration "<?xml version="1.0"?>". Now, this declaration isn't actually required, but nearly all XML docs have it nonetheless. If you start your XHTML doc with this declaration, IE 6 goes into quirks mode. That's pretty maddening. The way to get standards complaint behavior out of it to start your XHTML this way:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />

This isn't the end of the world, but it is a pretty good "gotcha" for beginning XHTMLers.

Item 2: Nested lists don't

In caveman HTML, the following code reliably produced nested lists:

<ul> <li>Item1 ` <ul> <li>Item 1a <li>Item 1b </ul> <li>Item 2

That's not going to work in XHTML. Instead, you must start the inner list with a list item:

<ul> <li>Item1</li> <li><ul> <li>Item 1a</li> <li>Item 1b</li> </ul></li> <li>Item 2</li>

Again, it's not the end of the world, but it is surprising behavior.

Item 3: Centering anything

In old HTML, nearly any "block display" item could be centered using the attribute "align" and setting it to "center". What could be easier? Well, XHTML is having none of that. Firstly, the "align" attribute has been removed. This means that positioning must be done through CSS. CSS centers text and block elements very differently. Text can be centered using the CSS attribute "text-align". Block elements require magic like "left: auto; right: auto." Again, it sort of makes sense once you're use to it, but come onâ¦

Item 4: ALT is required

There are lots of good reasons to put an ALT attribute on image tags, but please don't force me to add 'alt=""' every where. Not all images are that important.

Item 5: INPUT needs cuddle time

In XHTML, INPUT tags need to be in block elements like P or DIV. That's pretty lame, but I understand why this is.

For web browsers to display a web page, they must parse the HTML. This is act of figuring out what parts of the document are content and which are instructions. The instructions (HTML tags) are assembled into a tree structure according to the Document Object Model. Because of HTML's SGML roots, the browser often inserts "assumed" nodes into the tree to make sense of the given HTML. For example, if just a naked line of text is found after the BODY tag, that text is wrapped in a P node. Some of the guess work the browser needs to do for HTML isn't at all obvious or predictable. It is the reduction of these assumptions that is the raison d'etre of XHTML, by the way.

Anyway, INPUT tags used to be able to hang out by their lonesome but not anymore.

In conclusion, I'm happy I took the time to make the transition to XHTML but there was pain along the way.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.asf\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}] @="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.avi\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}] @="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mkv\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}] @="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mpeg\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}] @="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mpe\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}] @="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp4\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}] @="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mov\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}] @="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.rm\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}] @="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.rmvb\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}] @="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.wmv\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11D1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}] @="{c5a40261-cd64-4ccf-84cb-c394da41d590}"

Note that the @= is just setting the default value for the {NUM} key.

Good gravy. I thought commenting out Javascript in XHTML was bad. Take a look at this:

<style type="text/css" media="print, screen and (min-width: 481px)"> /*<![CDATA[*/ @import url("/2008/site/css/advanced"); /*]]>*/ </style>

That's from the W3C site. XML has created a monster.

jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz is a fine introduction into the wonderful jQuery. jQuery is a free javascript library that significantly eases the burden of manipulating the Document Object Model found in modern web browsers. The library has a distinctly functional feel to it, much like LISP. After reading this book, I'm humbled by the incredible job the architects of jQuery did in making such a clean and incredibly useful API. jQuery also bares the marks of Perl in its .map and .grep functions, and so warms the cockles of my heart.

Bibeault and Katz gently introduce the reader to this powerful library without overloading him with too much theory up front. This is not to say that the book is light on details. It is not. However, the less immediately useful details are pushed to the back of book. I found the Appendix on Javascript's damnabled Object system to be the most enlightening of all. While I understood the classless object system of Javascript before I read this, I did not really get the scoping rules (and I continue to be appalled at the insanity of it).

The order of the material is very reasonable. It begins with a bit of the philosophy of Unobtrusive Javascript, and then explains how to find DOM elements with jQuery selectors, how to manipulate those wrapped sets, how to install javascript events and how some of the built-in animation effects and utility functions work. All this is followed by a chapter on extending jQuery with plugins, a giant 50 page chapter on Ajax and a survey of useful plugins that are available on the jQuery site.

The highlights of this book include the discussion of Unobtrusive Javascript. This is literally a new concept to me and one that is much welcomed. The many references to the W3C HTML and DOM specs took me back a bit. During the ugly years of the Browser Wars, these specs were little more than wishful thinking. Yet now, most broswers (not IE) try to adhere to these documents. That's quite a sea change! The madness of event handling in DOM levels 0 through 2 is Lovecraftian (and perhaps explains a bit more of the problem my tic-tac-toe client has with IE).

The book is filled with practical examples of jQuery at work. The authors even have created little online tools to demostrate these concepts. I didn't find these to be all that useful, but I think I'm not the target audience. I'd rather come up with my own projects and apply these ideas to them.

I recommend this book to novices and pros alike who wish to get up to speed quickly on the use and philosohpy of jQuery.

As part of my technological foraging, I have been playing around with Ajax as presented through the new hotness that is jQuery. The result is a very humble, but all Ajax, tic-tac-toe game. This replaces the all flash version I had on this site for a while. Not only did I improve the AI of the computer player (thanks CS210!), but I have completely validated HTML and CSS files to boot.

Part of my inspiration comes from my current nighttime read, jQuery in Action by Bibeault and Katz. Besides gently easing the reader into jQuery concepts, the authors turned me on to the concept of unobtrusive javascript, which is the idea that HTML, CSS and javascript should be kept separate from each other, thus simplifying development considerably. One way to intrepret this concept is that HTML, CSS and Javascript all need to be keep in discrete files. That means no "onClick" attributes in the HTML, please. In structure, one can find liberation.

The architecture of my tic-tac-toe game follows a pretty standard client-server model. The server bit consists of a single PHP script that handles game session and AI. The client bit is simply an HTML file supported by CSS and Javascript. The client API is narrowly defined to prevent obvious forms of cheating and to enforce the idea that the client is a display and input mechanism that has little idea about how to play tic-tac-toe. The game logic is enforced by the PHP script. I'll discuss the design of the game engine later, but let's look at the client first.

The entire source for tic-tac-toe can be found here.

The place to begin with the tic-tac-toe client is the index.html file. This is a validating HTML 4.01 Transitional document. It has no TABLE tags at all. It depends on CSS float to make the playing board and handle the rest of the page layout. Because of some problems with Internet Explorer, there is a bit of IE-specific goo that forces a warning to appear in that browser. That will be the subject I return to last.

That HTML file is so clean, you could eat off it. Anyone who has done PHP or even a lot of javascripting will be surprised that such a simple file could be the basis of anything complex. As far as the game is concerned, the most interesting elements in the HTML file are the DIVs that have an ID attribute beginning with "s". In traditional video game parlance, these function as both buttons and sprites. I could have used HTML buttons here. Part of me still thinks that's the right way to go, but just using DIVs looks a lot more "gamey" to me. All the wiring of event handlers for these DIVs is handled in the ttt.js file, described shortly. The look and layout of the client is provided by the ttt.css file, which holds no surprises.

The client-side magic happens in the javascript. As it promises to do, the jQuery library greatly reduced the burden of locating and attaching elements, attaching click handlers and Ajax processing. Because the jQuery library is loaded before ttt.js, jQuery functionality is accessible in this file. The first four lines of code are pretty harmless:

var Game = new Object(); Game.timeout = 5000; Game.square_clicker_enabled = false; $(document).ready(init);

A global object called Game is created that will hold client-side game state. Scoping in javascript is a little primative, so having one global object in which to store various bits of information helps to reduce namespace clutter. The game property 'square_clicker_enabled' is set to false to prevent undesirable button clicking later on. I'll get to that. The most powerful statement here is the ready() function that calls init() (not shown yet) when the DOM is fully constructed in the browser. As any primer on jQuery will tell you, the more traditional onLoad() event for BODY elements does not run untill all the graphics are loaded on the page. The ready() function is ideal of initialization code. Speaking of whichâ¦

function init() { $("#newGame").click(new_game_clicker); var arg = new Object(); arg.get_board = 1; $.ajax({url: 'move.php', type: 'GET', data: arg, dataType: 'json', timeout: Game.timeout, error: bomb, success: function(a) { paint_board(a);} }); }

The init() function sets up the click handler for the "New Game?" button/DIV that ensures a new session and a blank board on the server. The fancy jQuery selector simply looks for an element with the ID of newGame. An object is created to hold parameters to be passed in the following Ajax request. The call to "get_board" simply requests the board state of the current game, if applicable. If the call is successful, the paint_board() function is invoked with the structure returned from the server. Even though the server returns a JSON serialized string, jQuery deserializes this structure and passed it to the function. That's some pretty terse code for an RPC mechanism!

function new_game_clicker() { if (confirm("Really start a new game?")) { var arg = new Object(); arg["new"] = 1; $.ajax({url: 'move.php', type: 'POST', data: arg, dataType: 'json', timeout: Game.timeout, error: bomb, success: function(a) { paint_board(a);} }) } }

There's little new code here at all. All veteran javascripters will have seen the confirm() dialog function. The click handler for the new game button is mostly another Ajax call. This one creates a new session and empty tic-tac-toe board on the server. Again, whenever the state of the board might have changed, paint_board() needs to be invoked.

function square_clicker(e) { if (Game.square_clicker_enabled) { Game.square_clicker_enabled = false; var arg = new Object; arg.pos = this.id.charAt(1); $.ajax({url: 'move.php', type: 'GET', data: arg, dataType: 'json', timeout: Game.timeout, error: bomb, success: function(a) { paint_board(a);} }); } else { alert("Thinking!"); } }

The click handler of each game board square is a little trickier. At its heart, the handler is merely responsible for sending the human's move to the computer using an Ajax call. When the player moves, the computer also makes a move and the new board state is returned and passed to paint_board(). Again, there are a lot of details behind that tiny bit of code!

The Ajax call is protected by a boolean. The idea is to prevent humans from wildly click on squares before the computer returns with the new game state. The opening move for the computer can take a few seconds to calculate, even when the depth of recursion is limited! I suppose that's why algorithms with a runtime performs of O(n!) are frown upon.

As simple as this mechanism is, Internet Explorer does not seem to like it very much. When I use that browser, I get all kinds of weird board states. It is a mystery to me why this happens, but this is why I include a warning to IE users in the HTML document.

function paint_board (a) { if (a.board == null) { $("#status").text("No game in progress"); Game.square_clicker_enabled = false; } else { for (var i=0; i < a.board.length; i++) { $("#s" + i).empty(); if (a.board.charAt(i) == '0') { var events = $("#s"+i).data("events"); if (events == null) { $("#s"+i).click(square_clicker); } } else { $("#s"+i).unbind('click',square_clicker); var e = a.board.charAt(i).toUpperCase() e = $("<span></span>").text(e).addClass("p"); $("#s"+i).append(e); } } Game.square_clicker_enabled = true; if (a.msg == null) { a.msg = " "; } $("#status").text(a.msg + " "); } }

Finally, the heart of the client code appears in paint_board. Given a structure from the server, it displays the game state on the board to the human. The board's state is presented as a nine character string where each position represents a place on the board. A zero is an unoccupied space, an 'x' represents the human's move and a 'y' represents the computer's. Notice that the client doesn't even know that much. It simply knows that 0 states are presented one way and non-zero another.

When the board is painted, the square_clicker_enabled flag is set to true, allowing the human to make a new move. If an open square is indicated by the board state, a click handler is installed if one does not exist. If the square is occupied, the click_handler is removed. Doing this without jQuery would have been horrible.

And there's the client! Amazingly small and even valid HTML. Will wonders never cease?

This post is already long. At some point, I'll go into the server code which has some moderated clever AI and some awful code to determine a win condition. Keep reachin' for the stars!

I have just finished Joshua Bloch's Effective Java Programming Language Guide and I can confidently say it is brilliant. This book will not introduce Java to the uninitiated, but it does illuminate the dusty and frankly perverse corners of a very powerful language. Although it is a dense read, it is a resource I will be returning to again and again.

With his many citings of the official Java spec, Bloch's authority is quickly established. Anyone that explains the uses and abuses of such common, but mysterious object properties as serialVersionUID and hashCode already has won me over.

Bloch's real gift is in making these opaque features understandable and putting them in to a context an average programmer is likely to understand. For instance, all Java objects have a clone() method that's meant to quickly and effeciently create new copies of an instantiated object. However, correctly implementing a clone() method is far trickier than it looks. And the same goes for the Serializable interface.

In many ways, Bloch complements the Gang of Four's Design Patterns. He extends the higher order approach to object-oriented programming into the Java context and provides concrete advice (e.g. favor object composition to inheritence, limit your APIs expose to the minimum, use the Singleton pattern for effeciency and comparison correctness, etc.).

What this book isn't is a how-to guide to anything. This is programming practices book and it rates as highly as any I've read.

Pymedia is a python wrapper around the ffmpeg C audio/video library. It is sometimes useful to compose a video from a series of graphic files or to decompose a video into a series of graphic files. Pymedia is one tool to do this.

There is a sample program on the pymedia site that claims to create a video from a series of separate graphic files. However, it contains a bug. Besides, it may not be as clearly written as it could be. Here's my rewrite of that code.

I have hard-coded in the function getFiles() that is a routine to find all the graphic files I want in the movie as sort them. If you reuse this script, you will need to write your own version of this.

import sys, os, time import pymedia.video.vcodec as vcodec import pygame def makeVideo(files, outFile, outCodec='mpeg1video'): pygame.init() fw = open( outFile, 'wb' ) if (fw == None) : print("Cannot open file " + outFile) return if outCodec == 'mpeg1video' : bitrate= 2700000 else: bitrate= 9800000 start = time.time() enc = None frame = 1 for fpath in files : img = pygame.image.load( fpath ) # Init once, but need details from an image if enc == None : params= { 'type': 0, 'gop_size': 12, 'frame_rate_base': 30, # 125, 'max_b_frames': 0, 'height': img.get_height(), 'width': img.get_width(), 'frame_rate': 90, # 2997, 'deinterlace': 0, 'bitrate': bitrate, 'id': vcodec.getCodecID( outCodec ) } enc = vcodec.Encoder( params ) # Create VFrame bmpFrame= vcodec.VFrame( vcodec.formats.PIX_FMT_RGB24, img.get_size(), # Covert image to 24bit RGB (pygame.image.tostring(img, "RGB"), None, None) ) # Convert to YUV, then codec d = enc.encode(bmpFrame.convert(vcodec.formats.PIX_FMT_YUV420P)) fw.write(d.data) frame += 1 if frame % 10 == 0 : sys.stdout.write("Progress: %05d/%05d\r" % (frame, len(files))) sys.stdout.flush() fw.close() pygame.quit() print '\nDone\n%d frames written in %.2f secs( %.2f fps )' \ % (frame, time.time() - start, float(frame) / (time.time()- start) ) def getFiles () : # Change this function to get files in the order you want them files = [] base_dir = 'M:/backups/hosted_sites/taskboy/public_html/spy' for f in os.listdir(base_dir) : if f.startswith("20") and f.endswith("png") : files.append(os.path.join(base_dir, f)) files.sort() return files if __name__== '__main__': files = getFiles() makeVideo(files, "out.mpg")

The core of this code is in the makeVideo() function. Pygame is used to load the graphic files into a format that pymedia's VFrame object can accept. That object is converted into a YUV format suitable for MPEG encoding.

You can control the speed of the images by setting the frame_rate in the params dictionary. Lower numbers are slower than bigger numbers. I leave as an exercise for the reader a refinement that allows for more fine-grained control of the MPEG encoding.

XHTML is a great idea, once you understand the shear Lovecraftian terror that is SGML, of which HTML is a child. Very few people understand all of SGML, including me, but here's the important point: SGML has all kinds of rules to imply elements. If you don't close your OPTION tag in HTML, the browser will create a node for the end tag anyway when in interprets that document. That's great, but in the case above, the browse does something completely predictable. However, there are plenty of ambiguous cases of what missing nodes should be created and trust me, brother, you don't want to go there. But this is a horrid topic for another day.

The problem with XHTML is that it is XML. So when you need to add a SCRIPT section, you need to escape it XML-style like this

<script type="text/javascript"> <![CDATA[ {js code here} ]]]]>

Wow! That's ugly! But wait, there's more. No Javascript engine knows anything about XML CDATA blocks so you need to hide that with Javascript style comments. So you get this:

<script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ {js code here} //]]]]>

What a mess! If this alone doesn't make you run for keeping your JS in a separate file, nothing will.

Ready for some more retro fun? Good. I have Rock Blaster for your enjoyment. It's a basic shooter wherein you attempt to destroy rocks falling from the sky. Every one you hit wins you points. Every one that hits the ground costs you points. Simple good fun.

Update: I have released a python bytecode version of this game that will run on any platform with python/pygame installed.

There is a certain irony in my blog being attacked by robots spewing nearly intelligent prose like:

If you've never heard Radiohead, you're missing out. ,

or

You're absolutely right â I have not attended the program, and what I've supposed about the community and its cohesiveness is pure speculation on my part. ,

While I can't be sure of the exact technique used to generate the bodies of these comments, it looks like a large body of human-generated text was used. Perhaps this corpus was gathered from forum posts or twitter. In any case, it looks like a random number of words are selected from this corpus and plopped into a message to taskboy.

The irony here is that I once used a slightly more sophisticated version of this technique to auto-generate journal posts to use.perl.org. The technique that generates nearly passable text is called markov chains. Markov chains use a simple statistical approach to figuring out which words commonly follow other words. It's sort of fun looking at the results the first time, but some people on use.perl.org got annoyed pretty fast by this.

In a future post, I will revisit the markov chain implementation I used so that you too can annoy your friends will robot blather.

The XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child organization is a wonderful toy. Sure it's not very powerful (430Mhz AMD Geode/256M RAM/1G flash HD), but it does have 3 USB slots, an SD drive, a builtin camera and WiFi 802.11b. It is possible to expand the file system through USB sticks or SD disks or even NFS (although this might be a little slow over WiFi).

It's not a replacement for a work PC or even a netbook, but it's an amazing device for experimental stuff (like building your own spycam). Think of it this way: the XO is a battery operated, WiFi enabled platform in a tough plastic case that you can build a variety of software toys with.

Without putting additional libraries onto the XO, I discovered that it is possible to do some image processing on the XO using pygame, the python bindings for SDL. For my spy cam project, I wanted to avoid transferring "blank" pictures to the degree that I could. Pictures can be nearly totally white or totally black. Programmatically, this can be determined in a number of ways. I choose to look at the average brightness of the photo.

Each photograph taken by the spycam is stored on disk as a PNG file. Each pixel in these PNG files has an 8-bit value for the Red, Green and Blue components. By adding each of these values together and dividing by three, a number is generated between 0 and 255. All of these averages can be added together and divided by the number of pixels to get the brightness of the average pixel in the photo. If the average is very high (greater than 250), the photo is mostly white and probably useless. If the average is very low (less than 10), the photo is mostly black and probably uninteresting.

The code below is a python script that runs on my XO. It uses the pygame library to do the photographic analysis described above.

import pygame import sys import os if len(sys.argv) < 2 : print "Supply an image file name\n" sys.exit() path = sys.argv[1] if not os.path.exists(path) : print "File '" + path + "' does not exist\n"; sys.exit() surf = pygame.image.load(path) bright_sum = 0.0 for y in range(0,surf.get_height()-1) : for x in range(0,surf.get_width()-1) : pix = surf.get_at((x,y)) # average brightness bright_sum += (int(pix[0]) + int(pix[1]) + int(pix[2]))/3.0 avg = (bright_sum + 0.0) / (surf.get_height() * surf.get_width()) print("%.2f" % avg)

The script is remarkably brief. It expects a filename to be passed on the command line. It loads the file to create a pygame.Surface object, which provides access to each pixel in the photo. The average brightness for each pixel is summed together. After all the pixels have been summed, the average brightness of the photo can be calculated and printed.

One gotcha that's worth mentioning is that all the math done in this process should be done with floats or doubles. There is usually a fractional component of averaging. Since I'm taking the sum of many averages, losing this fractional component is a problem. Therefore, make sure that all integers have a fractional component. This forces python to do the arithmatic with floats or doubles, which preserves precision.

More interesting analysis can be done. The pygame library provides a kind of beachhead for additional exploration!

SELECT * FROM T ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1;

This selects a random row from table T. Couldn't be easier.

One principle duct tape programmers understand well is that any kind of coding technique that's even slightly complicated is going to doom your project. Duct tape programmers tend to avoid C++, templates, multiple inheritance, multithreading, COM, CORBA, and a host of other technologies that are all totally reasonable, when you think long and hard about them, but are, honestly, just a little bit too hard for the human brain.

The Worse is Better article referred to in Joel's post was very influential to me. Also see Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which is a little different restatement of the issue.

The issue is software complexity and how to deal with it. It's an issue all programmers have been dealing with since the was such a thing as coding. In a perfect world, one could architect and plan every last detail of a software project before any coding happens. After all, that's what real architects of buildings do.

Unfortunately, software is inherently malleable and the hardware platforms change every 12 months. And new software solution appear every day. Planning takes a long time and complete planning is a task that I think can never be completed. So how can systems be designed at all?

There are many methodologies that have been proposed to accomplish all the good things that top-down design gives without all the costs. I subscribe to no formal methodology, but believe in iteration from prototypes.

Start with a flexible platform that's amenable to constant change. The Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl (LAMP) stack is exactly this kind of platform. Start building prototypes rapidly and get feedback from your clients on them. Apply changes as needed. Use source control to trim Bad Thinking. Design should be only a complex as necessary and no more. Don't paint yourself into a corner, but don't look to support all possible features that might or might not be requested of your software in the future.

As Fred Brooks said so wonderfully, there is no silver bullet to software design. And there probably will never be.

Peter Cummings and I had a brief musical relationship in the early nineties in which mad sounds were made and recorded. Pete died in 2004, but his friend, David Longey, put together an excellent online resource where you can listen to listen to pretty much everything Mr. Cummings did.

Pete dripped with talent. When you get a minute, do drop by that site for a treat.

A feature I wanted for my Spycam page is an animated loop of the last 5 pictures. All the pictures are in PNG format. There are several techniques that would accomplish this: GIF animation, SVG/Flash and JavaScript. I choose to use a pure JavaScript (or ECMAScript, to be politically correct) solution, which I'll detail in a moment. But first, I'll briefly talk about the alternatives.

Animated GIFs have been around nearly as long as the web. Here is an example of one that I created for my late Aliens, Aliens, Aliens web site:

The GIF file format allows for multiple frames and timing instructions for the pace of animation. At first, I thought I could do the same kind of animation with PNG files, but that format does not allow animation. With image manipulation libraries, I could create a new GIF and stuff it with frames converted from the five most recent spycam photos. However, that seemed like a lot of work and I didn't really want to create yet another file to keep track of. However, the advantage of this solution over the one I choose is that it scales better. That is, by serving a static animated GIF, taskboy.com vistors will not be continually pulling down an image for each animation loop. It's true that most browsers cache web assets, so it's likely that once the frames are loaded in the JS animation scheme, taskboy.com will be left relatively unmolested.

The next solution that occurred to me was to create a Flash SWF file of this loop. However, I'm not much of a Flash guy, nor am I emotionally ready to invest the time to learn the Perl interface to it. Of course, there is the XML-based, open source alternative to Flash called SVG. SVG does support animation, as you'd expect, but many browsers including Firefox do not yet support SVG animation. This was quite disappointing.

Finally, I hit on the relatively old idea of periodically switching the photo using DOM manipulation. The code to do this works in modern browsers (even IE 6). In pseudo-code, the strategy looks like this:

1. Setup an array of images in order from oldest to newest
2. Look for a well-known ID block and update the attributes of the child IMG tag with the next image in the array
3. Update the description in a well-knwon ID block
4. Schedule steps 2-3 to run again after a brief delay

Consistent browser support for DOM manipulation directly led to the Web 2.0 explosion of the early 2000s. It is possible to use Javascript to add, remove and edit nodes of the document tree in a consistent way across all major browsers. For those of you too young to remember, this was not always the case. There was an ugly time, known as the Browser Wars, that left many a young Javascript programmer mamed and bitter.

Let's back into this code from the HTML. After all, this is the structure to be changed dynamically. Fortunately, this document structure is pretty simple:

<div id="animator" align="center"> <div align="center" id="pic_desc"></div> </div>

This is simply a DIV block (ID = "animator") that encloses another DIV (ID = "pic_desc"). Where's the image tag? That will be inserted dynamically later and put ahead of the second DIV. However, an empty IMG tag could be added to the HTML right at the start. This will save some complexity in the Javascript later on, as will be noted.

The Javascript for this isn't complex in concept, but it may look a little daunting. However, it consists only of one globally scoped array and one function.

var Pictures = new Array("2009-09-24_21-10-01.png", "2009-09-24_21-11-01.png", "2009-09-24_21-12-02.png", "2009-09-24_21-14-01.png" ); function show_next_image(last_index) { // Calculate the next image's index last_index = (last_index + 1) % Pictures.length; // Find right element var e = document.getElementById("animator"); if (e != null) { var i = null; for (var j=0; j < e.childNodes.length; j++) { if (e.childNodes[j].nodeName == "IMG") { i = e.childNodes[j]; break; } } if (i == null) { i = document.createElement("img"); e.appendChild(i); } i.setAttribute("src", Pictures[last_index]); i.setAttribute("title", Pictures[last_index]); // Update description e = document.getElementById("pic_desc"); if (e != null) { var t = null; if (e.childNodes.length == 0) { t = document.createTextNode(""); e.appendChild(t); } else { t = e.childNodes[0]; } t.data = Pictures[last_index]; } } setTimeout("show_next_image("+last_index+")", 5000); }

The global array, Pictures, isn't difficult to understand. However, how those values are generated might be somewhat non-obvious. Recall that Javascript executes in the client's browser, which is to say, not on the server. How can the array known which files are current? The client doesn't have access to this information. The answer is that the PHP script on the server must determine these values. The script has access to the server and can see all the available files. The PHP code then has to generate the list of filenames that appears in the rendered Javascript code. This is the sort of thing that makes CGI scripting a little mind-blowing at times. You write code in one language that generates code for another.

The function, show_next_image(), depends on the global Pictures array. It is called with index of element of Pictures used previously to update the IMG tag. The % operator may not be familiar to you. It is the modulus operator. It returns the remainder of the integer division between its operands. It has the handy property of generating values between 0 and right-hand value. So, n % 4 never generates values greater than 3. To determine the index of the new Pictures element to display, the passed-in last_index is incremented and the result modded by the length of the array. After all, it is desirable that when the last image in the array is used, the next image should be the first image in the Pictures array.

After determining which Pictures element is to be used, the DOM needs to be examined to find the right nodes to update. Here, the getElementByID() function is used to find the parent DIV. Initially, this DIV has two nodes as written: a text node containing a new line and another DIV. The enclosed child nodes are searched for one that is an IMG tag using the slightly misnamed nodeName property. If such a node is found, its reference will be stored in i. If no node reference is found (as will happen in the initial run), a new IMG node is created with createElement(). All nodes except text nodes are created with this DOM function. The new node then is added to the list of child nodes that the animator DIV has.

I need to point out to anyone following this code carefully that a small display bug has been introduced in this code. If there is no initial IMG tag, the created IMG node will appear below the description, which is undesirable. To prevent this, I simply have an empty IMG tag in the HTML about the "pic_desc" DIV. If you want a pure solution that does not require this HTML stuff, feel free to leave your solution in the comments section of this entry.

An empty IMG tag isn't useful. An IMG node requires at least one attribute, SRC, to do something visible. The SRC attribute tells the browser where to fetch the image to be displayed. This is exactly the information that is stored in the Pictures array. Each element is the relative path to a graphic asset on my server.

Although it is possible to set node attributes with a number of different syntaxes, I recommend always using the setAttribute() function. Not only does it work with all kinds of DOM nodes in all major modern browsers, but if the attribute does not current exist in the node, it is created. This Do What I Mean behavior may be a legacy of Perl, but I can't be sure. Certainly, I don't see a lot of other examples in DOM where one gets a free lunch.

Once the picture is updated, the description follows. The only thing really different about this node manipulation is that it deals with a text node. Text nodes are the stuff that falls outside of HTML tags. This includes the oft-forgotten newlines that are common in hand-written HTML documents. Text nodes are created with the appropriately named createTextNode() function. The text in a Text node is updated through its data property. The pic_desc DIV should only ever have one node that is a Text node. If it has one, it is updated. If not, one is created and inserted as a child of that DIV. Then the data property is updated.

The most interesting part of this code is also the shortest bit. The DOM function setTimeout() takes two arguments: a string that represents code to be executed at some future date and delay in milliseconds that the browser will wait before executing. Notice that the code to be excuted is a string. That is, it will be eval'ed when the delay time elapses. Eval'ed code is a little weird the first time you run into it. It's code that you write at runtime to be executed at runtime. Most code is traditionally written before compile or interpreter time. In this case, I want to schedule this function, show_next_image(), to run again. You'll notice that this will cause the function to run forever, which is the desired effect.

A quick word about the delay setting in this function. In my testing, I found the delay value unreliable. Here, 5000 milliseconds are specified, but I believe the real-time delay between executions of this script were much shorter. Is there a way to create a more highly reliable counter? You could keep track of when time last went off and make decisions about whether to run again, add or substract a delay. If you're trying to write a game in JS with 20 updates per second using this method, you've gotten on the road to perdition.

The last bit of code needed to kick off this animation extravaganza is something that initially invokes the code. In this simple example, using the onload event for body will work well.

<body>

This executes only once when the page is loaded and calls the desired function with an index before the first one. If calling show_next_image() with a -1 index seems like a cheat to you, you can rewrite the function so that it detects when it is called with a null value and assigns 0 to last_index. For me, I'll stick with -1.

If you did not want to use DOM events to invoke this function, you could simply put a script section at the bottom of the BODY tag that called show_next_image(-1) (or its moral equivalent).

Mastering this simple DOM technique opens the way for much more sophisticated work. But that's another post.

"Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."

Dynamic, weekly-typed languages like Perl and PHP are wonderful productivity engines. It's amazing how much work one can accomplish with so few lines of code. Both languages allow the programmer to treat simple scalar variables as numbers or strings without a lot of casting or explicit conversions. However, there is a price for this magic.

Consider the following PHP code:

array_push($array, '"' + $file + "'");

This looks harmless enough. It looks like contents of the $file string are being enclosed in double quotes and that new string is being pushed on the end of $array.

Not so fast! The + operator is a little magical. That is, it operates as a concatenation operator when the operands are strings and as a sum operator when the operands are integers. Wait, didn't I just say that values are weakly typed in PHP? How can the interpreter tell the difference between strings and ints?

The answer for both Perl and PHP is that strings that start with integers are considered to be integers for the purposes of magic.

In the code sample above, the filename in question indeed started with "2009-09". PHP took the integer part of the string, 2009, because of the + operator. Then it clearly had a string operand ('"') and a integer (2009), so it "promoted" the integer back to a string, "2009".

And that's how's how I lost my filename, which caused me to spend the next 30 minutes debugging the problem.

It occurred to me today that there is an important philosophical difference between the older web service protocols like XML-RPC and SOAP think of themselves and the way REST does.

SOAP and XML-RPC spend a lot of their spec on format of their messages. In particular, how application data is serialized into XML. How that message is moved from one host to another is less important. Both protocols assume that developers will use HTTP, but certainly other protocols can be used. In fact, Leostream at one point used XML-RPC messages across a pipe rather than TPC socket.

REST on the other hand focuses almost entirely on how messages are passed. That is, REST is tightly bound to HTTP. Application data can be serialized in a number of ways, none of which are particularly important to REST.

With a small bit of scripting, I have created a cron task on my XO laptop to take pictures every minute and upload them to taskboy.com. You can see the result on my spycam page.

The camera is positioned in a second story window looking out on my amazing backyard. Will you see a deer? A cat? Chupacabra? You'll have to keep coming back to find out!

The script on my XO looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl â -*-cperl-*- use strict; use POSIX qw[strftime]; my $outfile="foo.png"; my $web_dir="/path/to/spy"; my $ssh_id = q[user@myhost.com]; my $remote_name=strftime("%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S.png", localtime()); my $delete_horizon=7; # Take the picture my $cmd = qq[gst-launch-0.10 v4l2src ! ffmpegcolorspace ] . qq[! pngenc ! filesink location=$outfile ] . qq[> /dev/null 2> /dev/null]; system($cmd); # Is this picture mostly empty? if (-s $outfile < 80_000) { exit 1; } # Upload to taskboy $cmd = qq[scp -q $outfile $ssh_id:$web_dir/$remote_name]; system($cmd); # Remove old link ; relink to new file $cmd = qq[ssh $ssh_id 'cd $web_dir && rm current.png;] . qq[cd $web_dir && ln -s $remote_name current.png']; system($cmd); # Remove older pictures $cmd = qq[ssh $ssh_id "find $web_dir -name '*.png' ] . qq[-ctime +$delete_horizon -exec 'rm' '{}' ';'"]; system($cmd); # Remove local file unlink($outfile);

In other news, did you know the XO appears to have sshd running by default? Very useful for those of us that just want a command line anyway.

I am at the very pinnacle of 1997 technology.

The built-in webcam in the XO laptop fascinates me, in the same way parrots are fascinated by mirrors. I like to pick at it to see what I can do. I've been trying to find a simple command line invocation to take a picture and I have found it here:

gst-launch-0.10 v4l2src ! ffmpegcolorspace ! pngenc ! filesink location=foo.png

Please note that the first parameter in that list is in all caps V4L2SRC, not V412SRC, as this post points out. That typo caused no little end of annoyance for me.

This command snaps a photo and creates a PNG file called foo.png in the current directory.

The key to understanding video on the XO is learn about GStreamer, a Gnome multimedia interface that works on pipelines. That is, you build up commands with gstreamer like you uses command pipes in shell programming. Obviously, if you're not familiar with shell programming, GStreamer is likely to be quite opaque for a while.

In any case, GStreamer can be used to capture pictures, video and audio. It can also play audio files and stream video to other servers. Pretty strong ju-ju.

Also see this python hack for making the XO into a spy camera.

The Perl module Math::BigInt::GMP is a wrapper around the GNU Multiple Precision arithmetic C library and is useful for certain other math-intensive Perl operations. Ominously, the C library page warns that "GMP is very often miscompiled! Please never use your newly compiled libgmp.a or libgmp.so without first running make check" which makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. However, I needed this lib.

On my Ubuntu linux machine, the Perl library (Math::BigInt::GMP) would not compile because of gmp was not installed. It would have been nice if the docs for this lib had mentioned this dependency. In any case, I install gmp with the following shell command:

apt-get install libgmp3-dev

If prompted by apt-get to install additional dependencies, agree. Then go back and install Math::BigInt::GMP.

make clean; perl Makefile.PL && make test && make install

I'm beginning to think that entropy is enclosing around the Great Camel.

M3U files are more commonly known as MP3 playlist files. These are simple files that contain URLs to MP3 files served over an HTTP server. These files may can additional metadata that can be used by MP3 players (like Winamp) for display purposes. I few months ago, I built a simple playlist server in Perl so that I could listen selectively to my vast MP3 collection. You may find the entire source code for this playlist server, called Pixie, here. It has been tested under both Windows and Linux, but should work on Mac OS X too.

At its heart, the Pixie is simply an embedded HTTP server. It serves four specific kinds of pages: an M3U playlist file, a CSS file, the HTML music selection page and specific MP3 files. In additional, it has two HTTP services that are essential to this process: adding MP3s to the current playlist and clearing the list entirely. There can be only one playlist per user.

When a user first points a web browser to the URL belonging to Pixie, a page is presented with all the directories and MP3 files found in the top level of the directory specified by the "-d" parameter. In my case, that's the M:/mp3 folder.

Folders may be traversed and the assets of those directories may be added to the playlist. Notice that there is a crumb trail at the top of the page that leads you back to the root directory.

After a few music assets are selected, the current play list is displayed. Notice that the assets come from different directories.

To listen the the playlist, simply click "Play now" in the Current Playlist section. What could be easier?

The pixie.pl script is somewhat long. It clocks in at 447 lines, even though that includes a small usage screen, a CSS file and an HTML template for the directory listing pages. This script is a little long for a blow-by-blow description of each line of code, but a few points about it should prove illuminating for those wanting to write their own HTTP servers in Perl.

It is perhaps useful to know that I structured the HTTP part of this code on the mod_perl/Apache model. That is, there are some global variables available to the fucntions that handle HTTP responses. The heart of the server can be seen in the relatively small main line code below:

my $S = HTTP::Daemon->new(LocalPort => $Opts->{p}, Reuse => 1, Listen => 5, timeout => 10, ); while (my $c = $S->accept) { Log("Connection from: " . $c->peerhost); while(my $r = $c->get_request) { $This_Request = $r; $This_Connection = $c; handle_request(); } } exit 0;

This code snippet starts with a pretty standard instantiation of an HTTP::Daemon object, which itself is a subclass of IO::Socket. For servers, it is important to set the Reuse parameter which allows the TCP port to be reused quickly after the last process has exited. Without this parameter, you'll find that you cannot invoke a script that uses the same port without a "cooldown" period specific to the OS.

With the server socket in place, pixie waits for new client connections in an accept loop. From the client socket, the HTTP::Request object can be obtained. Both of these important objects are stored in global variables for use in the handle_request() and later functions. Why not pass these objects into handle_request()? It turns out that there are all kinds of places these objects are useful for. Passing them explicitly gets to be a bit onerous. Let's look at handle_request().

sub handle_request { my ($c, $r) = ($This_Connection, $This_Request); if ($r->method ne 'GET') { $c->send_error(HTTP_FORBIDDEN); next; } my $path = $r->uri->path; my @query = $r->uri->query_form; if ($path eq '/serve.m3u') { # Assemble this sessions selections # into an m3u and serve that file do_serve_playlist($c, $r); } elsif ($path eq "/clear") { # Clear playlist do_clear_playlist($c, $r); } elsif ($path eq "/pixie.css") { do_serve_css($c, $r); } elsif (@query) { # Could be an add request # Set a cookie, if needed do_add_asset($c, $r); } else { do_browse($c, $r); } }

This function can be thought of as trampoline code. It's just is to route the handling of the request to the right routine, which in this case I call "page handlers". Page handlers are functions that all start with "do_" and are responsible for actually sending an HTTP response with content.

The function handle_request() does its routing based on a quick analysis of the details of the current request. Every HTTP::Request object has an initialed URI object in it. The URI object breaks apart the requested URL into logical parts and saves us from writing custom parsing code. You notice that two paths look like they reference real files: pixie.css and serve.m3u. However, this is an illusion. All web servers can be thought of as file systems proxies. Like all proxies, you never can be quite sure how the resource you are requesting is stored on the back end.

There is also a magic path called "/clear" that signals the server to clear the current playlist from memory. There is only one function that does HTML form handling because there is only one form and it only adds MP3 files to the current playlist. If none of these requirements are met, do_browse() is called which serves either a specific file or a directory listing. It is this function I'd like to turn next to since it contains HTTP Cookie handling.

sub do_browse { my ($c, $r, $cookie) = @_; my $path = urldecode($r->uri->path); if ($path =~ /\.\./) { return $c->send_error(HTTP_FORBIDDEN); } my $fs = get_fs(); my $real_dir = $Opts->{d} . $path; $real_dir =~ s!/!$fs!g; my $res = HTTP::Response->new(HTTP_OK); if (-d $real_dir) { $res->header("Content-type" => "text/html"); if ($cookie) { $res->header("Set-Cookie" => "sid=$cookie; path=/"); } else { my $sid = get_sid($r); if ($sid && !exists $Sessions{$sid}) { Log("Can't find SID '$sid' in: " . join(", ", keys %Sessions)) if $DEBUG; my $epoch = "Wed, 31-Dec-1969 01:00:00 GMT"; $res->header("Set-Cookie" => "sid=$sid; expires=$epoch;"); Log("Deleting old cookie '$sid'"); } } $res->content(make_page($real_dir, $path, ($cookie||get_sid($r)))); return $c->send_response($res); } elsif (-e $real_dir) { # Serve real file in a new process $c->send_file_response($real_dir); } else { return $c->send_error(HTTP_FORBIDDEN); } }

This page handler is the most complicated because it must decide if the requested path is valid, if a cookie needs to be set or removed or if a file or directory listing needs to be sent. Let's start at the beginning.

The path in the URI could need URL decoding, so that is done first. Next, a quick sanity check is performed to make sure the request isn't attempting to get a resources the server isn't meant to serve. The parent directory URL hack was a common exploit in early web servers. Next, all directory separators are converted to the OS appropriate. Whatever happens next will require a new HTTP::Response object, so one is created.

If the path sent is a directory, a directory listing is required. Directory listings are generated by the make_page() function. The content-type is set in the response object, as pixie will send some kind of HTML. If the browser sent us a Pixie cookie, we simply update it with the current Session ID. If cookie has a Session ID but the server has no record of it, the cookie is deleted from the browser. Which is to say, a new cookie is sent with an old expiration date.

I've glossed over the details of Pixie session management in the above paragraph. When a user builds a playlist, the list needs to be kept somewhere. Pixie stores this list in server memory. Each list is assigned a random number which is its session ID. This ID is passed to the client with HTTP cookies. Every time the client makes a request, this cookie is passed back to Pixie. There is a global hash table called %Sessions that stores the association between ID and play list.

To finish off do_browse(), if the path of the request points to a real file, it is served without much more sanity checking. There is definitely room for improvement here in terms of security. The next page handler of interest is the one that handles requests to add files to the current playlist: do_add_asset.

sub do_add_asset { my ($c, $r) = @_; my $path = $r->uri->path; my @query = $r->uri->query_form; # Is there a cookie? my $sid = get_sid($r); unless (exists $Sessions{$sid}) { Log("Could not find $sid in: " . join(", ", keys %Sessions)) if $DEBUG; $sid = time(); Log("Creating new SID '$sid'") if $DEBUG; } # For all the "a" params, # base64 decode and add to Sessions hash for (my $i=0; $i < @query; $i += 2) { if ($query[$i] eq "a") { # retain order through value my $cnt = scalar keys %{$Sessions{$sid}}; $Sessions{$sid}->{decode_base64($query[$i+1])} = ++$cnt; } } Log(sprintf("\%Sessions has %d keys\n", (scalar keys %Sessions))) if $DEBUG; return do_browse($c, $r, $sid); }

Much of the first part of this routine should be familiar by now. What's interesting is that if no valid Session ID is found, a new one is created based on epoch time. If security is a concern, you should use a different method to generate IDs, like UUIDs. In any case, for each query parameter in the request (which is to say, MP3 file paths), the path is decoded from base64 and added to the sessions hash. This is complicated by wanted to preserve the order in which the songs are selected. This ordering is perserved in the Sessions hash. Let's see how the actual playlist files are served.

sub do_serve_playlist { my ($c, $r) = @_; my $sid = get_sid($r); if (!$sid || !defined $Sessions{$sid}) { $r->uri->path("/"); return do_browse($c, $r); } my $res = HTTP::Response->new(HTTP_OK); my @files = map {$Base_URL . $_} get_sorted_playlist($sid); my $out = make_playlist(@files); $res->header("Content-type" => "audio/x-mpegurl"); $res->header("Content-Length" => length($out)); $res->content($out); $c->send_response($res); $c->shutdown(2); return; }

The trickiest part about serving the playlist is getting the MIME type right. The MIME type gives a hint to the browse about the kind of file being served and what sort of external application the browser should use for it. Creating the playlist file is handled by make_playlist() and is pretty straight forward. Note the use of the draconian shutdown(2) on the client socket. I found on Windows that without this call, Winamp never launched. By closing both ends of the client socket, the web browser can be sure it has the entire file, which means that it is safe to launch the external program.

An interesting feature of Pixie is that the look and feel of the directory listings can be controlled with an external CSS file. Simply create a pixie.css file in the root of the MP3 directory and go to town. You can see what the default CSS file looks like simply by pointing your browser to http://localhost:[pixieport]/pixie.css.

Finally, there is ample room for improvement in the Pixie server. There are a number of security enhancements that can be made to ensure that only authorized files are sent. Pixie is a single threaded application and does not handle concurrency at all. Concurrency is a pretty thorny issue to get right for a platform neutral server. The core of the issue is the way Perl handles sockets and filehandles. On Linux, I would fork a new process for each new client request. That's a very clean way to make Pixie more responsive. Child processes inherit the open filehandles of the parent and so sockets can be handled independently in each process. On Windows, the fork() builtin merely emulates forking behavior with threads. Unfortunately since sockets look like filehandles, closing the client socket in the parent after fork (which is what you'd do on Linux) closes the socket in the child. It's not clear to me what solution would work here. I thought perhaps IO::Select would be a good choice, but then I suspect that when music files are sent, that will almost always block the directory listing traffic. I suppose this is a scaling mystery to be solved on another day.

xv is an ancient but small X graphic file viewer. If you try to compile the latest source (3.10a) on Centos 5, you'll get the following fatal error message:

In file included from xv.c:11: xv.h:119 error: conflicting types for 'sys_errlist'

To get a successful compile, simply edit xv.h. Remove all the #defines around 'include <errno.h>' (about 4 or 5 lines). Replace with the single line:

include <errno.h>

Type 'make' again and your compile should succeed.

Sometimes you need to secure a message could be intercepted by party for whom the message is not meant. One moderately good way to do this is using the Vigenere cipher.

The Vigenere cipher is a kind of caesar or subsistution cipher. It uses a sequence of letters called a Key to determine the substitution. Compare this to the constant shift function of caesar. In Caesar crypt text, all occurences of a particular clear text letter will be the same subsistute letter (i.e. 'Z' always stands in for 'E'). In Vigenere, the substitute for a clear text letter changes depending on where that letter occurs. Neat trick, eh?

The Key is a shared secret known only to those parties authorized to read the message. The encoded text cannot be cracked in the same way that a caesar inciphered text can be, although there are sophisticated avenues of attack known to the NSA and other professionals.

Vigenere works by using a tabula recta, which is is a table of the alphabet in rows and columns, like the following:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y

Notice the letters in column 2 are shifted 1 from column 1. This is important, as you'll see in a moment.

To encode a message, you need a key. The key needs to be as long as the clear text message. Repeat the key as needed to make the key long enough. For example, if my key is "ORANGE" and my message is "IAMASECRETAGENT", then you would need to expanded the key to "ORANGEORANGEORA". To encipher the message, walk through each letter of the clear text. For each letter, find the column that starts with that letter of the clear text and look down that column for the row that starts with the corresponding letter of the Key. The letter you find there is the cipher text substitution for that letter. So, the first letter in this example is "I" with a key letter of "O", which means that the substitution is "W". Here's the completed example:

In the real world, messages will comprise more characters than just the uppercase letters of the alphabet. There are two ways to handle this when implementing the Vigenere cipher in code. Either reject all characters that are not part of the tablua recta or simply make the subsistute character the same as the input. The latter technique is the one I favor, but that may make the crypt text easier for someone to crack. For example, what do think this crypt text is refering to?

Surely, this is a URL. Further, one can safely assume that "zT4N" is "http" in clear text. That's a lot of context to give away.

Implementing this complex cipher in Perl is straight forward. The first thing to do is to build the tablua rect:

sub build_matrix { my @Wheel = ((0..9), ('A'..'Z'), ('a'..'z')); my $M = [[]]; for (my $y=0; $y [$y]->[$x] = $Wheel[($y + $x) % @Wheel]; } } return $M; }

Notice that my alphabet is composed of numbers and both cases of letters. This set of characters is contained in the @Wheel array. By looping through the array twice, it is possible to create a two dimensional array. A careful look at the code reveals our old friend the shift function from the caesar cipher. Each column is shifted by one.

You may not be familiar with the modulus operator %. The modulus operator returns the remainder of an integer division. For example, 13 % 5 is 3. Modulus operations have the interesting property that they always return values between 0 and one less than the second operand. Of course, this fits neatly in with arrays that begin indexes their elements at zero.

One last note. Even though this function returns the tablua recta, the caller stores the array in a globally visible variable called $M. This global is referenced in the encoding function below.

sub enc { my ($plain, $key) = @_; # Find the row of the cipher for (my $y=0; $y [$y]->[0] eq $key) { # Find the column of plain text for (my $x=0; $x [$y]}; $x++) { if ($M->[0]->[$x] eq $plain) { return $M->[$y]->[$x]; } } } } return $plain; }

This function expects a clear text letter and the corresponding key letter. The row of the key letter is found in the tablua recta (i.e. $M) and then the column of the clear text letter is found. Whatever letter is found in $M at that location is returned to the caller. Notice that if the plain letter cannot be found in the tablua recta, that character is returned as the subsistution.

What remains is to show the main part of the program that calls these functions:

my @key_text = split //, $key; my @plain_text = split//, $message; my $new = ""; for (my $i=0; $i

Here, the Key and the message are hard coded in $key and $message respectively. Each of these is split into arrays of characters. For every character in the plain_text array, the encoding function is called and the cipher text is built and later printed.

Notice the return of the modulus operator. Instead of trying to expand the key to match the length of the message, a simple modulus operation is used. This saves a bit on memory and it is easier to implement than the literal expansion of the key.

To decrypt the message, replace the enc() call in the main line with dec(), shown below:

sub dec { my ($cipher, $key) = @_; # Find the row of the key for (my $y=0; $y [$y]->[0] eq $key) { # Find the column of the cipher for (my $x; $x [0]}; $x++) { if ($M->[$y]->[$x] eq $cipher) { return $M->[0]->[$x]; } } } } return $cipher; }

Notice that it is the inverse operation of enc(). It is passed a cipher letter and the corresponding key. The row of the key is found and the column that contains the cipher letter is found. Then the first letter of that corresponding column it found, which represents the clear text letter. If no match is found, the cipher text is returned.

Of course, you don't need to use this implementation. There is one on CPAN already, although it uses only 'A'..'Z' for its alphabet and strips off other characters.

Happy enciphering.

Security, it is said, is a process, not a product. For every method of securing information from unauthorized eyes, there is (or will be) a counter measure. There are two aspects of security: authentication and authorization. Authentication is concerned with determining the identity of user wishing access to a secured resource through the use of some kind of credentials. Authorization is the set of rights a user has over a secured resource. In Unix terms, a user's account name and password as stored in the file /etc/passwd are the authorization credentials needed to log into the system. The permissions on files and directories represent the authorization mechanism.

In the world of web services, the need for authentication and authorization is clear. For example, twitter.com allows a user to update his status through a public API. However, only the owner of that account should be allowed to make updates. Reusing an existing authentication/authorization mechanism, Twitter's API expects account credentials to be passed through the basic authorization method of HTTP.

An even more secure authentication/authorization mechanism is X.509 PKI standard in which clients and servers exchange encrypted credentials that identify themselves to each other. Each certificate has a "web of trust" or chain of authorizing servers that can be consulted to establish the validity of its origin. Setting up this web of trust, however, can be a daunting task.

Some applications may simply wish to hide information from authorized eyes without the complexity of a full PKI implementation. One old cryptographic technique to do this is the Vigenere cipher, whose origins date back to sixteenth century (although the name come from a nineteenth century diplomat). The Vigenere cipher is a novel twist on the very ancient caesar cipher.

A caesar cipher works by substitution a letter of the plain text message with a different letter of the alphabet. The substition is not random, but represents a constant "shift." To understand a shift, image an ordered list of the capital letters from 'A' to 'Z', where 'A' occupies position 0 and 'Z' is at position 25. A shift is a function that takes a plain text letter, adds a fixed amount of position and returns the letter at the new position. For example, shift('A',1) would produce 'B' and shift('Z', 1) would produce 'A'. To decrypt a caesar encrypted message easily, you need to know the alphabet used and the shift amount.

Caesar ciphers were used heavily for centuries, but are not particularly secure because they do not change the frequency of occurence of letters. In languages with alphabets, some letters occur more frequently than others. In English, the most common letter is 'e'. If caesar-encypted text is long enough, whatever letter presents 'e' will also appear often. One can then workout the shift and from there the rest of the message in a process that resembles "Wheel of Fortune."

For the curious, here's a snippet of Perl that represents the shift function:

sub encode { my ($s, $shift) = @_; my @parts = split //, $s; my $t = ""; for my $p (@parts) { $t .= chr(ord('A') + ((ord($p) + $shift) % 26)); } return $t; }

To decode a caesar inciphered message, the following function will work:

sub decode { my ($s, $shift) = @_; my @parts = split //, $s; my $t = ""; for my $p (@parts) { $t .= chr(ord('A') + ((ord($p) - $shift) % 26)); } return $t; }

Next time, we'll look at how to implement a Vigenere cipher in Perl.

(Note: Thanks to gizmo, I have corrected an abbreviation expansion problem.)

Uniform Resource Locators are an addressing scheme at the heart of the Web. Without them, there would be no stardard way to refer to a resource offered by a web server. URLs remove the ambiguity of addressing a resource, but at the cost of creating some rather formidable namespaces (e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9549).

In general, long URLs aren't a problem. Either through web page hyperlinks or web browser bookmarks, URLs fade into the background for most users. However, sometimes it is more convenient to have a shorter reference to a resource than the fully qualified URL. For example in the late nineties on IRC, it was common to see tiny.cc URLs pasted into chat rooms. Long URLs tend to clutter up already busy chat room windows. With the advent of text message-based systems like Twitter, which limit status updates to 140 characters, long URLs are actually consuming a valuable resource. The most common URL shortener used on Twitter.com appears to be bit.ly

There are several URL shortening services out there and they all work pretty much the same way. The user supplies the full URL. The service hashes the URL into something smaller and appends this to its own namespace. Using the bit.ly service, the mozilla URL becomes: http://bit.ly/g0Z9. When someone accesses this bit.ly URL, he will be seemlessly redirected to the original resource.

Bit.ly provides a REST interface to their service (API).
To use this, create an account on bit.ly's system. Now you are ready to build a Perl REST client for the shorten service (http://api.bit.ly/shorten).

The following code is a listing of a small command line Perl script that expects to be passed a long URL. It uses the bit.ly REST service to return a shortened version.

use strict; use LWP::UserAgent; use Getopt::Std; use HTTP::Request; use URI; my $VERSION = "1.0"; my $Opts = {}; my $bitly_api_url = q[http://api.bit.ly/shorten]; my $long_url = pop @ARGV; getopts('u:p:?', $Opts); if (!$long_url || $Opts->{'?'}) { print usage(); exit; } set_defaults($Opts); my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new; my $fetch_url = URI->new($bitly_api_url); $fetch_url->query_form({'version' => "2.0.1", 'format' => "xml", 'longUrl' => $long_url, }); my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $fetch_url); $req->authorization_basic($Opts->{u} => $Opts->{p}); my $res = $ua->request($req); if ($res->code == 200) { my ($url) = ($res->content =~ m!(+)!); unless ($url) { warn("FAIL: [". $res->content . "]\n"); exit 1; } print "$url\n"; exit; } else { warn("FAIL:[".$res->content."]\n"); exit 1; } #ââ # sub #ââ sub usage { return OPTIONS ? - Display this screen u [USERNAME] - Bit.ly username p [PASSWORD] - Bit.ly password EOT } sub set_defaults { my ($h) = @_; $h->{u} ||= "taskboy3000"; $h->{p} ||= "s3c3rt"; }

This code uses the standard Perl module Getopt::Std to parse optinal command line arguments. The set_defaults function merely uses my bit.ly credentials if none are provided through optional parameters. Next, a new LWP::UserAgent object is created to make client HTTP calls. The bit.ly shorten service expects a GET request with optional arguments encoded as query parameters in the URL. The bit.ly service can respond to requests with data in various formats (e.g. XML, JSON). In this case, the format parameter is set to "xml."

The URI class manages the extra parameters through the query_form method and urlencodes these into the new URL. A simple HTTP::Request object is passed the new URL and the bit.ly credentials are added to the HTTP request header using the authorization_basic method.

Once the HTTP request has all the information, it is ready to be sent to the bit.ly server. The HTTP::Request object is passed to the LWP::UserAgent::request method, which contacts the server and encodes the response as an HTTP::Response object.

If an error occurred in transmission, the response will have a HTTP status code other than 200. Even if the requests succeeds, the service might fail due to missing or bad credentials. A simple regex extracts the shortend URL from the XML message and reports on the command line for easy consumption by other command line tools.

This script will run on any platform supported by Perl.

For a long time, I've ignore the Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture. For one thing, I don't particularly agree with its premise that remote procedure calls (RPC) that use HTTP as a transport mechanism should obey the same semantics as regular web traffic. Things like XML-RPC and SOAP are, to my thinking, happening on an entirely different layer of the application stack than HTTP. Indeed, there are implementations of XML-RPC that do no use HTTP at all.

I remember pretty heated arguments I witnessed at tech conferences in the early 2000s about this seemingly unimportant technical point. For REST adherents, web services are another form of web traffic and should be treated as such. Given that Twitter, Facebook and Bit.ly all use REST for their APIs and older apps like liveJournal use XML-RPC/SOAP, I guess REST is the new hotness.

I've recently had reason to interact with the Twitter and Bit.ly APIs. This has made me come to terms with REST RPC mechnanisms. I admit, the sad, sick part of me that enjoys playing around with low-level HTTP stuff finds satisfaction in the way these API leverage existing HTTP features like basic authentication, extra path info, and GET and POST semantics. In this post, I thought I would show a bit of Perl code I wrote post status updates to Twitter, an activity more commonly referred to as "tweeting."

Twitter's API documentation is relatively straight forward, if you already have a solid grounding in HTTP. The API call to tweet is called "statuses/update". The basics of the RPC mechanism are easy enough:

• The caller makes a HTTP GET or POST request
• The sender replies with content in the form of JSON or XML

Let's start with the request. There are serveral bits of information required by the API: user credentials, the URL and additional query parameters. The user credentials are passed as part of the HTTP request header as a basic authentication field, which is merely a base64 string that is the concatenation of the username and password of your Twitter account. Fortunately, Perl's HTTP::Request::Common class makes it easy to add basic auth credentials to the request without knowing how this information is encoded in the HTTP request.

The next bit is the URL to the function. This is a core idea of REST â function calls should have URIs and look like ordinary web resources. In this case, the URL is http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml. Interestingly, the response from twitter can be encoded in a number of formats. These formats are determined by the extension you give to the URL. For instance, I could have request the metainformation about myself in JSON with the following URL: http://twitter.com/users/show/taskboy3000.json.

The text of the tweet must be passed to the URL as if it were POSTed from a form. The parameter name is status. The status must be encoded as if the data were submitted from an HTML form. Again, Perl makes this very easy, as will be shown below.

use LWP::UserAgent; use HTTP::Request::Common ('POST') my $api_url = q[http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml]; my $status = "Tweeting from the API!"; my $twitter_username = "taskboy3000"; my $twitter_password = "s3cr3t"; my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new; my $req = POST($api_url => [status => $status]); $req->authorization_basic($twitter_username => $twitter_password); # Make the request my $res = $ua->request($req);

The code above is sets up and makes the status RPC call to twitter. The first thing needed is an LWP::UserAgent object, which is kind of like a web browser. It makes HTTP requests of web servers. To construct the POST request, I use HTTP::Request::Common::POST. Because I can pass in form parameters as plain perl data structures, it frees me from worrying about urlencoding values and fooling around with HTTP headers that are germain to the task at hand. POST() returns an HTTP::Request object.

Adding my twitter account credentials to the request is a simple one line call to authorization_basic(). Very handy and very clean. That's all the setup I need to make the request. I pass in the HTTP::Request object to the User Agent object. That makes the actual network connection to the URL. The response comes back in the form of an HTTP::Response object, which I'll discuss next.

If all has gone well with the request, I'll get back an XML document that looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <status> <created_at>Tue Apr 07 22:52:51 +0000 2009</created_at> <id>1472669360</id> <text>At least I can get your humor through tweets. RT @abdur: I don't mean this in a bad way, but genetically speaking your a cul-de-sac.</text> <truncated>false</truncated> <in_reply_to_status_id>1472669230</in_reply_to_status_id> <in_reply_to_user_id>10759032</in_reply_to_user_id> <favorited>false</favorited> <in_reply_to_screen_name></in_reply_to_screen_name> <user> <id>1401881</id> <name>Doug Williams</name> <screen_name>dougw</screen_name> <location>San Francisco, CA</location> <description>Twitter API Support. Internet, greed, users, dougw and opportunities are my passions.</description> <url>http://www.igudo.com</url> <protected>false</protected> <followers_count>1027</followers_count> <profile_text_color>000000</profile_text_color> <profile_link_color>0000ff</profile_link_color> <friends_count>293</friends_count> <created_at>Sun Mar 18 06:42:26 +0000 2007</created_at> <favourites_count>0</favourites_count> <utc_offset>-18000</utc_offset> <time_zone>Eastern Time (US & Canada)</time_zone> <profile_background_tile>false</profile_background_tile> <statuses_count>3390</statuses_count> <notifications>false</notifications> <following>false</following> <verified>true</verified> </user> </status>

Most of this, I don't care about. However, I do want to see if there's an tag. If so, there was a problem with the post. The way I handle this error checking can be see in the following code.

unless ($res->is_success) { my $c = $res->content; my ($errstr) = ($c =~ m!<error>(+)</error>!); warn(sprintf("Post failed (%d): $errstr\n", $res->code)); exit 1; } print "OK\n"; exit 0;

Without the services of a full XML parser, it's relatively easy to look for an error tag and extract the contents for display. The error message I've encountered most is essentially "you used the API too much". Twitter does restrict the usage of some of their API calls, but not the status one.

If you collapse all the Perl code, you're looking at less than 20 lines of code. If you wanted to, you could even make posts using the very handy command line tool curl: curl -u taskboy:s3cr3t -d "status=hello curl" \
http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

I will leave the checking of error messages from curl output as an excerise for the reader.

As I said, REST RPC mechanisms are fun and interesting if you already understand HTTP. However, not everyone does. I think XML-RPC and SOAP libraries to a better job of insulating the programmer from the HTTP protocol, allowing him to focus on the API task at hand.

There's a new online tool section on the Projects page of this site that contains links to tools I've written that may be useful to other people.

There are two additions to this toolset. The first is an encoder/decoder that can handle uuencoding and base64. This can be useful if you need to do a quick conversion, but don't want to bust out Perl/Python/PHP etc. to do it.

The second addition helps convert phone alpha phrases (e.g. 1-800-MYPIZZA) into all digits. There are many such utilities on the web, but here's my take on it.

Enjoy.

UPDATE: Added Percent encoder to the mix. I should have done this 12 years ago. It would have saved me a lot of pain.

DHCP:

iface eth0 inet dhcp

Static:

iface eth0 inet static address 1.2.3.4 netmask 255.0.0.0 gateway 1.0.0.1

Now, don't forget it!

Enterprise IT: The Final Frontier

When people use the term "Enterprise Information Technology", what kind of environment are people really talking about? For me, this term refers to the facilitation and management of integrated corporate information by software and hardware for medium to large organizations. Enterprise IT differs from IT at smaller organizations in both scale and the requirement of a lot more management and automation tools. Tools that work quite well in Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) environments often do not scale for larger organizations, do not address the correct problem or cannot integrate with the kinds of systems common to enterprise IT structures.

This is not to imply that SOHO applications are inferior or less robust. Even if application costs were not an issue, there are many enterprise IT applications that are simply not appropriate for SOHO environments due to hardware requirements, installation complexity, administrative overhead or missing network dependencies (for instance, some applications may require SNMP-aware switches that are lacking in most SOHOs).

The key attributes of an enterprise IT solution are scalability and integration. Scalability is the process by which an application may be altered to handle increasing amounts of usage. Notice that I said "process". Too many vendors tout scalability as a feature, which it is not. Application scale through many techniques, but all require the intervention of system administrators to implement. Google search engine, for instance, scales to millions of users searching billions of pages of content, but it requires thousands of commodity servers deployed in standard shipping containers distributed through the world. Without scalability, an application can meet the growing demands of the end-user.

Integration is the other distinguishing feature of IT software. Large IT systems must be able to exchange information with other IT systems in an automated way. For instance, a network management tool needs to be able to retrieve network statistics from smart switches and routers. SSLVPN routers need to be able to talk to a center Authentication and Authorization system, like Active Directory. Without integration, information gets repeated in individual applications. This creates the undesirable "siloization" of information that significately reduces the efficiency of IT departments and can even compromize security.

There are several components of enterprise IT that can be broadly categorized into the areas discussed in the next part of this essay, coming soon.

Every opinion looks better with a graph and no graph has captured my experience of working in software more than this.

The most fun part of working in tech is working in some niche that's climbing the Peak of Inflated Expectations. The inevitable Trough always comes, but there's a kind of doublethink that techies have that pretends this isn't the case. I believe this is instinct comes from the same self-preservation skill that allows us not to dwell too long upon our own impending mortalities.

In a small scale, I'm looking forward to the popcap war game Plants vs. Zombies which appears tomorrow.

As of today, I'm putting some Google AdWords on this site. The positioning is relatively hidden, but I think anyone looking for ads can find them easily enough.

To improve google's indexing of my site, I have created cached versions of all my blog entries (over 1200 pages!). The permalink format for the blog entries has changed a bit. I guess that makes the old links not very perma.

I will be adding more technical content here more regularly. I'll try to crank out a solid article every week with daily updates of my technical shenanigans.

Perhaps I'll even make some merch on Zazzle in the pursue of filthy Mammon.

If I feel the need for non-technical blogination, I'll either update my Facebook profile (which I'm loathe to do) or finally use my LiveJournal account.

Last weekend, I dropped in on the Maker Revolution in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA. Readers of magazine Make will know that there is an emerging culture of creative people how are not satisfied with mere software robots but desire physical ones as well. This exhibition/conference had a mechanical bottle/wind organ and the dude is is Orgy of Music, who grafts transducers onto items like tennis rackets and then plays them like a guitar. It's a sort of atonal jam band thing. He pushes the signals through various effects processors and amplifiers to achieve a loud effect.

The main talk I saw was from Bre, who leads a community of CAD-enabled hackers with access to various automated fabrication tools. He was promulgating the idea of a an on-demand society in which everyone could create the items they need (like glasses or cultery) as they needed them.

This techno-political idea struck me as a sort of mutation of the Web 1.0 matra "zero warehousing." It also struck me as fundamentally unworkable. The whole point of capitalism is that you can use money to get things so you don't have to make all the stuff you require. While capitalism has its quirks, it still the best system anyone has come up to distribute human labor and wealth.

Anyway, I enjoyed the show. I wish I were more crafty.

wget âmirror ârelative âno-parent [URL]

This prevents wget from traversing back up the parent and fetching the whole site.

format PE GUI 4.0 entry codestart include 'win32a.inc' IDD_MAIN = 100 ID_START = 201 section '.data' data readable writeable hInstance dd ? section '.code' code readable executable codestart: invoke GetModuleHandle, 0 mov [hInstance], eax invoke DialogBoxParam, eax, IDD_MAIN, HWND_DESKTOP, \ MainDlg, 0 invoke ExitProcess, 0 proc MainDlg hdlg, msg, wparam, lparam push ebx esi edi cmp [msg], WM_INITDIALOG je .wminitdlg cmp [msg], WM_COMMAND je .wmcommand cmp [msg], WM_CLOSE je .wmclose xor eax, eax jmp .finish .wminitdlg: jmp .finish .wmcommand: cmp [wparam], BN_CLICKED shl 16 + ID_START je .startbutton .wmclose: invoke EndDialog, [hdlg], 0 .startbutton: jmp .finish .finish: pop edi esi ebx ret endp section '.idata' import data readable writeable library kernel, 'KERNEL32.DLL',\ user, 'USER32.DLL' import kernel,\ GetModuleHandle,'GetModuleHandleA',\ ExitProcess, 'ExitProcess' import user,\ DialogBoxParam, 'DialogBoxParamA',\ EndDialog, 'EndDialog' section '.rsrc' resource data readable directory RT_DIALOG, dialogs resource dialogs,\ IDD_MAIN, LANG_ENGLISH + SUBLANG_DEFAULT, \ main_dialog dialog main_dialog, 'Dialog test', 0, 0, 150, 50, \ WS_CAPTION + WS_POPUP + WS_SYSMENU +\ DS_MODALFRAME + DS_CENTER dialogitem 'BUTTON', 'Hello', ID_START, \ 50, 15, 50, 20, WS_VISIBLE + WS_TABSTOP enddialog

For the last seven years, I have been developing applications for Virtual Machines(VM) as a part of the Leostream Corporation. This market has developed from essentially an academic research project to a multi-billion dollar a year ecosystem with many players. The technologies involved in virtualization are well covered in Wikipedia and elsewhere, but they are summarized here and links to more detailed information is provided. Much of this has been discussed in the standard industry media outlets for some time, but I'd like to offer my perspective on the industry, its players and where things are likely to go.

The Technology

Below, three broad categories of virtualization are discussed that create isolated environments on a single, physical system. The computer system that runs this kind of technology has physical hardware and is typically called a host system. The isolated environments hosted on such systems are called guests and run entirely as software. Although the term virtualization has recently come to mean just paravirtualization, the technologies discussed all can be used to varying degrees for the applications listed later in this article.

Any hardware can be emulated in software. Emulators have been critically important to firmware developers who need to design against drivers for hardware that isn't available to them. Developers of console games and mobile phone applications frequently use emulators to reduce development cycles.

Although emulation allows any machine architecture to be hosted on the user's workstation, the emulated guest typically lacks performance. There is a lot of overhead in the application pretending to be a different machine. For many data center applications of virtualization, emulated x86 machines do not perform well enough. However, for development purposes, emulation is often adequate.

Another common approach to creating an isolated operating system (OS) environment is the use of partitioning. Partitioning takes many forms. The designers of Unix were trying to create a multiuser version of a single time-sharing system called Multics. In a standard Unix system, many users may be logged into the system, but each has his own directory and process space. However, users can see the files and processes of other users on the systems, which can lead to some security concerns.

To improve on the initial security model of Unix, chroot was developed to more fully isolate users more from each. An extreme extension of this idea can be found in User-mode Linux, in which each user appears to have a dedicated copy of the underlying OS. In UML, an unique instance of the filesystem appears to each user. With Virtuozzo Containers or Solaris Containers, Windows or Solaris OSes can be partitioned too.

For performance and flexibility, paravirtualization is the current state of the art in hosting technology. This technique uses as much of the bare metal components of the host machine do as possible to do work for the guests. Typically, guests see a standard set of virtual hardware, virtual storage and BIOS irrespective of the actual hardware of the host. Virtualized guests can run nearly any OS that can run on the host system's architecture.

Paravirtualization is a flexible compromise between emulation, which allows any OS for any architecture in the guest to run, and containers, that allow a very high number of guests that run a version of the host OS. Early paravirtualization software runs mostly as a usermode application hosted in a well-known OS like Windows or Linux. However, hypervisors have begun to replace these older applications. Hypervisors are tiny OS kernels optimized to run as many VMs as possible. Hypervisors are controlled either through a special console VM or a client application that runs on the administrator's workstation.

Business Drivers of Virtualization

To understand the business-case for virtualization technology, a brief digression into recent Information Technology (IT) history is productive.

At the end of the twentieth century, many businesses had accumulated a not-so-small army of workstations, dedicated servers, minicomputers and mainframes. While there were many business-critical applications that demanded the entire computation and I/O horsepower of the machines on which they were hosted, there also existed a growing class of under-utilized machines. These machines often served lightly-used, but important applications that were not easily be migrated to a new hosts or capable of sharing a single host with other applications.

The proliferation of these one-off machines burdened IT budgets. There are several costs associated with maintaining a machine in a corporate datacenter including the following: power, air conditioning, monitoring, hardware replacement and rackspace. These are recurring costs that quickly exceed the original price of the hardware. Despite this, server applications (particularly web servers and databases) continued to be in demand throughout most organizations through the late 1990's and 2000's.

The utility of ubiquitous computing in an organization had very measurable results in productivity and profit, but the maintenance and security of physical machines introduced really concerns for IT and management. Fortunately, three events happened that would ameliorate these issues: fast processors, fast and ubiquitous networking, and VMware.

VMware has its roots in a research project at Standford. The idea was to bring paravirtualization from the IBM mainframe world into the more limited x86 platform. The i386 could easily emulate 8086 machines in hardware, but could not easily handle its own more sophisticated architecture. VMware created a product that could create pentium-class Virtual Machines (VM) on pentium hosts, with better performance than emulation.

Moore's law fits with virtualization very well. By the mid-2000's, 32-bit Pentium 4s and similar AMD chips could host, with enough RAM, 4-10 VMs. 64-bit CPUs with multiple cores and hardware support for virtualization improved the host's ability to run dozens of guests.

The Applications of Virtualization

There are three general uses of virtualization technology that achieve real business goals today: server consolidation, development and hosted desktops. While any of the virtualization methods previously outlined will work for these applications, some technologies marry better to some purposes than others. Let's first discuss these applications and the business drivers behind them.

Server consolidation is the process of replacing dedicated physical machines with guests running on a few well-provisioned hosts. This is often what brings virtualization into IT departments. By consolidating hardware, maintenance and power savings become immediately clear. Sometimes, end-users see the benefits of consolidation when their application moves from a older host to a VM running on much newer and faster hardware.

Consolidation is most often done with paravirtualization, which often requires very little adjustment of the target legacy application. The process of migrating a physical host to a virtual machine can be done either manually through backups or automated with P-to-V software, like the kind Leostream used to sell. These days, there are a number of commodity tools available to handle P2V conversions.

Application development and quality assurance befits incredibly from any kind of virtualization technology. Developers and QA engineers often need access to a number of machines with specific OS versions and patch levels. Because this use-case generates a lot of sparsely used machines quickly, the need for managing libraries of guests across across dozens of hosts lead Leostream to develop the Virtual Machine Controller in 2003.

This group of users tends to be inside the corporate LAN using high-speed network connections to get console access to their VMs. This profile is very different from the folks in the next group.

Hosted desktops are an attempt by organizations to replace standard workstations with thin client terminals or terminal emulators. By keeping desktops in the data centers, sensitive information stays within the corporate firewall and support costs for workstations reduces significantly. Users benefit also by not being tied to one workstation and can get to their virtual desktops using some remote protocol like RDP, VNC or ICA.

While remote access to machines isn't that revolutionary for most IT workers, there are many challenges to moving the general population to remote desktops. The most pressing is in matching up users with target desktops. While a 1-1 mapping of users to machines isn't too hard to manage, VMs offer much richer schemes with complex policies. As the task of managing users and machine increases, the need for special connection broker software becomes critical.

The basic components of a host desktop deployment are a client, some kind of broker and a target desktops. This simple picture hides a wealth of complexity found in large deployments, in which SSLVPNs, corporate network policies, staffing policies, and departmental hardware and software requirements often create a tangled skein indeed.

Because VMs are often used as the target desktops, VMware created the term Virtual Desktop Initiative (VDI) to describe all the pieces involved in a hosted desktop deployment. However, many companies are using a hybrid approach to hosting desktops that uses physical machines, VMs and Citrix.

Many companies are currently pursuing the hosted desktop market, which some analysts have predicted will be far larger than the server consolidation market. If most large companies decide to replace their employee's workstations with thin clients, the market will be very large.

The Virtualization Layer Players

Below are the four most interesting players offering virtualization layers. This, of course, is an arbitrary list, but a useful one for someone new to the field. There are many, many more players in the virtualization space that offer more specialized offerings.

It would be hard not to mention VMware first in any discussion of virtualization. Although they did not invent the idea (IBM did), they have been the leader in x86 virtualization since 1998. VMware now offers a number of free to use virtualization products including VMware server and ESX 3i, but of which I use at home.

In 2003, Microsoft bought Connectix, makers of Virtual PC and entered the virtualization market. After some early missteps with Virtual Server, Microsoft has bundled Windows 2008 and Windows 7 with a hypervisor that should offer VMware some competition at the commodity end of the market. It is my impression that Microsoft doesn't quite know what they expect this technology to do for them. It's not a simple mass-market product like MS Office. Right now, virtualization is an enterprise IT thing. Perhaps Microsoft is setting the stage for ubiquitous client-side hypervisors, but it's not clear to me how that will benefit them. Virtual Computer, on the other hand, should do quite well in this kind of world.

In 2007, Citrix, who brought remote desktops to Windows in the 1990's, bought XenSource, the commercial arm of the Open Source Xen virtualization layer. Xen has been bundled into XenApp, which used to be called Presentation Server. Citrix appears to be using Xen to capture the server consolidation market, but is hedging its bets in hosted desktops with Xen. Perhaps 2010 will be a crossover year for them.

Parallels is a youngish company that offers a compelling combination of paravirtualization and containers (through their merger with SWSoft). Unfortunately, I don't believe their marketing is cutting through the noise of the bigger elephants in the virtual room. However, they continue to do descent business. Parallel Containers (nee Virtuozzo) is very popular with ISPs who need to cut costs at every opportunity.

There is another group of virtualization vendors that deserve mention. This group includes some well-known names as well as some that you may not have heard of. In your own projects, you may find the wares offered by these companies to be very compelling.

IBM is the original inventor and patent holder of virtualization on their mainframe equipment. The offer a broad spectrum of products and services around virtualization, including the HC12 teradici-enabled blades that offer the very high performance PC-over-IP remote access protocol. If I could afford it, I would buy four of these blades and client pucks for my home.

Sun (or is it Oracle now?) offers the entire VDI stack, just not as a boxed product. Desktops can be hosted on Sun SANs served through Solaris Containers or VirtualBox, brokered through their connection broker and accessed using Sun Ray thin clients. Since I worked a lot with the Sun Ray thin clients, I'm a little biased towards them. Their APL protocol optimizes the desktop session over high-latency networks. If your users are primarily outside the corporate LAN, this is pretty much the only thin client to use.

VirtualIron offers an optimized Xen hypervisor with a proprietary Java management interface. They have succeeded in targeting the server consolidation market. Their product is a snap to install and scales well horizontally.

Virtualization has been a core part of Linux for a while now. Red Hat and Suse both ship with the Xen/KVM/QEMU virtualization suite and tools to easily create Windows VMs on host machines with VT-enabled, 64-bit processors. I have been disappointed that neither company has gone after the hosted desktop market with the zeal I'd expect. But it is still early in that market.

VirtualComputer is leading the charge in client-side hypervisors. This idea is a bit like VMware's ACE in that the user has a VM on his laptop that can be management by corporate IT. The critical difference is that the laptop is running a hypervisor and the user is experiencing the VM as if it were the console. Potentially, you could swap between several VM images. The advantage of this abstraction is that the corporate image can be locked down tightly while allowing a more open OS image to be used at the discretion of the end user.

The Future

The immediate future of virtualization is clear: it will become completely ubiquitous. End users will become comfortable connect to remote machines and the methods to make those connections will become faster and more transparent. Service providers like Comcast and Verizon will rent VMs to their Internet or cable TV customers, who will use their digital receiver as a thin client. The technology to do this exists today.

Another fallout of pervasive VMs will be the rise of virtual appliances. Already, there is a small cadre of networking applications out there. I see virtual appliances becoming the dominant paradigm for shipping certain kinds of applications. Think of this is a kind of Software as a Service to-go. I have first hand experience developing for virtual appliances and the benefits to the publisher are many. What's lacking are installation tools that making virtual appliances install like traditional ones. But I'm sure someone is tackling that problem now.

Virtualization provokes a disturbing question for OS vendors: who controls the hardware? Traditionally, the OS made the hardware accessible to applications. Hypervisors force the OS to a higher level in the application stack. Will hypervisors soon appear only in BIOS or hardware? If so, what does that mean for OS vendors? Nothing good.

Makers of peripheral hardware may also lament the rise of VMs. You cannot install a new video card in a virtual machine, for instance. I suppose there may arise an open standard that allows VMs to more fully access physical hardware, but none now exists.

Software vendors are the clear benefactors of virtualization. There's a whole new class of problems to solve.

Sally and I are revitalizing a 10x24 slab room with half bath this week. We'll be installing an Ikea Tundra floating floor.

So if you see an police blotters out of Chelmsford, you'll have the inside scope.

As of last week, I have become an independent software consultant again. As part of this transition, I'll be redesigning this here web site and moving content around a bit. I also will be putting ads on this site and taking the content in a more technical, professional direction.

Some may question the taskboy.com domain for this purpose, but actually I obtained this domain specifically for a business idea.

The content I have in mind will move beyond just Perl. Some of it, while useful, will probably be quite boring to my non-industry friends. I suppose Facebook as a purpose after all.

In the turtle's defense, that shoe was totally asking for it.

Is this all part of Global Warming?

As readers of this blog know, I've long warned of the dangers of keeping monkeys near urban centers. Now, another tragedy underscores the urgency of the danger:

A male chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo planned hundreds of stone-throwing attacks on zoo visitors, according to researchers.

Keepers at Furuvik Zoo found that the chimp collected and stored stones that he would later use as missiles.

How many more years does humanity have until the dreaded Chimp Infitada?

WaPo reports:

The 200-pound chimp who was fatally shot this week after a vicious attack on his owner's friend also bit a woman in 1996, the woman said in an interview broadcast Thursday.
â¦

Travis's owner, Sandra Herold, who raised the chimpanzee from its infancy, has said he was a loving pet whose behavior Monday was out of character. She said the chimp combed her hair each night and slept in her bed.

Alan Greenspun, you old salt! What's on your mind today?:

"It may be necessary to temporarily nationalise some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring," he said. "I understand that once in a hundred years this is what you do."

Oh my! Been hitting the sauce again, have we?

This year, I will attempt the RPM Challenge. I will deliver 35 minutes of new material to RPM HQ by March 1 (which is a Sunday).

I have been batting a few ideas around lately and would like to explore composition from a different angle this time around.

Wish me luck.

UPDATE: Feb. 14. Due to illness, I don't think I'm going to be able to finish 35 minutes of music this month/year. Bummer.

Goodbye, George.

You were our least legitimate, most willfully ignorant, most damaging president this country has had in the past century â quite an accomplishment.

You traded our liberties for security, our wealth for poverty, our International friends for foreign dictators. You broke the government agencies that worked and created new ones that didn't. Time and again, you rewarded failure and punished competence. You called your foreign policies "wars". Distrusting America justice, you built a dungeon in Cuba and authorized torture. You were overshadowed by your own Vice President, a grimacing, hateful psychopath your own party didn't like very much.

It's not all your fault. House Republicans took full advantage of your flaming ineptitude to further their own agendas. Luckily, your opposition was mostly supine during your tenure. But no one wanted to rescue you from you.

So, this day has been a long, long time in coming. You're probably not a bad man, W. You were just not very good at your job. You were a disappointment to your supporters and a monster to your opponents.

Now please, get the hell off the People's lawn.

Patrick McGoohan and Ricardo Montalban died this week. Both had cool last names. Both were dramatic forces to be reckoned with and both will be missed.

Loyal Taskboy Readers,

Markdown is an open source text filter written in God's Own Perl. Even though the taskboy blog is written in PHP, I can shoehorn this fitler into the comment system to allow greater markup. I may write a primate forum for taskboy built on the comment system. Stack Overflow uses this system, which is what brought it to my attention.

I ask you, readers, is it desirable that I add the Markup filter to comments?

UPDATE: Thanks to the Internet's feature of building applications before I need them, I have just run across Markup for PHP.

Just a reminder from Tech Recipes:

• T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
• Virgin Mobile: [phonenumber]@vmobl.com
• Cingular: [phonenumber]@cingularme.com
• Sprint: [phonenumber]@messaging.sprintpcs.com
• Verizon: [phonenumber]@vtext.com
• Nextel: [phonenumber]@messaging.nextel.com

Where, oddly enough, [phonenumber] is the 10-digit phone number.

Last Defense is a game that should be familiar to most of you. While playable, the game is about 80% done. It plays fine on my macbook (60 fps), but simply crawls on my windows box (14 fps). I'm not sure that the problem is. Use at your own risk.

I developed a framework around pygame to "rapidly" develop this game. While I didn't spend a lot of time fooling with pygame, I did spend a ridiculous effort on the basic game logic. It's amazing how complicated space invaders really is.

Graphics continue to elude me, so I borrow those from existing free projects. I have found a pretty decent pixel editor called Pixen for Mac OS X. Of course, that program does not magically imbue me with graphic talent.

The framework needs, er, work. It doesn't not help me manage different game "scenes," which is the metaphor I use to describe the various game screens. In the case of this game, I'd say there are perhaps 2 scenes.

Sigh. Programming is hard!

Ground Zero allows users to see the blast radii of various historic atomic weapons on the city of their choice. It's a mash-up with google maps.

This is what Web 2.0 is about!

Sam Huntington, political scientist and Harvard professor, died today. Although gaining wide recognition for his ideas about the necessity of civil leadership oversight of strategic military decisions, his more lasting contribution to modern and future political discourse may well be in his concept of the Davos Man.

Normally, I don't dwell too much in the past, but there were a few notable celebrities passing this year that mark personal milestones for me. This list is in no particular order:

Allan Melvin: Sam the Butcher is as good a representative as any for blue collar labor.

Issac Hayes: Doctor Soul, Hayes was responsible for a good bit of the musical background of my childhood.

W. Mark Felt: Deep Throat ignited the Watergate scandal that would lead to the kind of paranoia that birthed PseudoCertainty.

Betty Page: Really, is there any need to dig deeply into this one?

Paul Benedict: As the deranged number painter on Sesame Street, Benedict helped infect me with dada-ism.

Paul Newman: Food magnate and actor, Newmie's Own Lemonade is a winner in my house.

Jerry Reed: As a child, I seemed not be able to swing a dead cat without hitting a TV with Reed on it.

Don LaFontaine: LaFontaine is the voice of movie trailers. What will Hollywood do without him?

Estelle Getty: ESTELL GETTY WAS STILL ALIVE THIS YEAR?!

Tony Snow: The Mouth of Sauron and oddly good blues harmonica player

Jesse Helms: Racist, Luddite and general cretin, Helms on his death bed, mostly likely dissolved into a cloud of acrid smoke leaving a greasy residue on the sheets. I believe that's the typical way an incubus leaves this plane of existence.

Kermit Love: He made the Big Bird costume. Can you get more iconic than that?

George Carlin: I'm only now understanding the jokes he told in the 70s. Next up: Bill Hicks. Then I'll be all caught up.

Jim McKay: The Wide World of Sports announcer was a fairly constant voice of my youth. This is the only person on my list even vaguely associated with sports.

Tim Russert: One classy newscaster. While still guilty of giving into popular consensus, he at least made a good show of pressing fat, self-satisfied politicians.

Charlton Heston: As influential to me for his acting as for his crazy defense of gun ownership. Soylent Green, indeed!

Arthur C. Clarke: A consummate nerd who made it big. The movie 2001 is still impressive thirty years later.

Gary E. Gygax: After achieving 36th level in all available professions, Gygax's petition for apotheosis was granted.

William F. Buckley: While I didn't agree with his politics, I did feel he came by his beliefs honestly. A conservative who could change his mind â go figure.

Roy Scheider: He will always be my idea of an action hero.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: As a student of transcendental meditation, I certainly owe this dude some thanks. But his creepy beard gives me the jibblies.

Barry Morse: While I never understood the premise of Space: 1999, Moorse did a fine Spock-clone impersonation.

It's winter in the Northeast and yesterday was a snow day in which eight inches of snow accumulated on the ground.

I took the opportunity to re-organize my basement, which had an ad-hoc order created by the movers six months ago. It turns out, there's a lot more room down there than I previously thought.

What's not down there now are frog mummies. The reason there aren't any is because I removed the final one last night and thoughtfully took a picture of it for you, my loyal and lucky readers.

Don't call it a comeback.

In what will always be called by me "my birthday storm," many trees and power lines where destroyed in the historic ice storm that clobbered the Northeast last Thursday night. I have been in blizzards, high winds, driving rain even hurricanes, but I don't think I've ever been so frighten about getting smacked by natural chaos as much as I was during this ice storm.

"Ice storm" seems like a pretty week descriptor for this kind of phenomenon. How about "Mr. Frosty's Revenge?"

Here are a series of photos from my mobile phone of the carnage. It's pretty hard to get the scope of the problem from these. This weekend, Chelmsford looks like war zone.

Update: Power has been restored and I am once again safely ensconced at home.

Birthday number 37 is nearly over for me. It's been a hell of a year and much better than last year. Mother Nature gifted me (and most of northern NE) with a historic ice storm that knocked out power to my home. I was kept awake last night by the insanely frequent sounds of branches failing under the weight of 1" of ice. Doesn't sound like much, but it was enough to snap mighty limbs of the mature oaks in my yard.

I'm a lucky guy. I've got a great wife, a wonderful home and even a job that pays me. What more could I ask for (cough Amazon gift certificates cough)?

I'm moving taskboy to a new server. Everything will be broken for a while, especially taskboy.com mail.

I'll get it fixed eventually. I hope.

UPDATE: Mail is working (it appears). RSS feed generation is not. Probably The Feed Bag isn't either.

I've never been so happy to be wrong.

McCain's concession speech was perhaps his finest hour. He showed the kind of real decency and true patriotism that have been sorely absent from the G.O.P. since 1994. Perhaps McCain's best service to the country is in the Senate. I admire him for calling Bush on the insanity of legalized torture, even during a time of crisis. It's easy to vomit forth a catalog of "values" when there's no danger. It's those who hold to their principals when their bacon is on the line that I listen to.

The Dems have taken the Senate and may yet control the House. This is a notice that even a blind elephant can see: the days of the neocon are over. Move to the center; ditch the lunatic evangelics; purge your party of corporate whores; accept the multicultural nature of today's America and figure out how to become respected citizens of the world. These core values are what brought the US through WWII and the fifties. It will work again.

I wasn't alive during the time of JFK, but I believe Obama's got a similar charisma and intelligence. I fully expect him to stumble through the first year of his presidency. It's damned tough job.

Finally, don't expect Obama to deliver on the specifics of his campaign promises. He can't. We're looking at tax hikes and cuts in services to pay for many years of bipartisan myopia and grift.

To my lovely bride, happy anniversary. We made it the whole year mostly injury-free!

Taskboy is moving from the excellent colo arrangement it now has for something new. So expect some turbulence from now until Jan. 2009.

I'd also like to publicly thank Nate Patwardhan for all his unsung admin work in keeping the box alive and stable. Nate should get a job as a sysadmin or somethingâ¦

âReuters

Thank you for speaking your conscience, Mr. Powell. I knew you weren't a mindless partisan.

This is long overdue.

Is it just me or does this Amazon review by Scott Smith look a bit too familiar?

I've never been so closely, er, quoted before.

«A Middletown woman is arrested, after chasing children, urinating on a porch, and blocking traffic⦠all while wearing a cow suit.»

âWKRC News

It would be so easy to judge this woman's behavior, but I ask you, is there a person among us who has not wanted to do exactly the same thing?

No?

Oh, then I suppose it's just her and me then.

Fine.

Losers.

As the fabled $700 billion dollar bailout plan staggers through the White House and Congress, I'd like to offer an alternative and cheaper plan for restoring investor confidence in Wall street, helping stablize banks and providing real relief for millions of American homeowners.

It is breathtaking in its simplicity.

The Fed should buy all the bad mortgage debt at some percentage on the dollar. Then, the Fed should turn around and sell properties back to home owners at fair price. If the feds end up unable to unload all the property they own, big deal â it's an opportunity for more parks.

This gives banks immediate liquidity, but still punishes them for being completely asleep at the wheel. Real Americans will actually become honesty-to-goodness homeowners again and paying a mortgage they can afford. Mostly, we get the Feds out of the business of directly investing in Wall Street, which I'm not sure I'm very comfortable with.

The downside of this plan is that those property owners with more equity than debt will be penalized as the value of their homes decresses. However, those are the risks in a market economy. Not all investments are guaranteed to increase in value.

I think the Feds have massive bargining power with the banking industry. Instead of Wall Street dictating the terms of the loan (I bet you wish you could have done that with your mortgage!), the Feds, who have the Gold, should set the Rule.

I believe my plan is far cheaper than $700bn. Perhaps the whole thing could be done for $350bn, which is a number, while still huge, is hardly enough to run the Iraq "War" on.

Unfortunately, there are conservative ideologs that despise the concept of the government directly helping its citizens in large numbers. Sure, it's OK for Uncle Sam to bomb people Over There, but it's just terrible for the Fed to improve the lives of taxpayers directly. That's too much like socialism. Of course, the US has many elements of socialism already since capitalist, like cats, tend to get themselves stuck up a tree every so often.

Let's not continue to reward the irresponsible behavior of the true elites of this country, Wall Street Robber Barons. The jig is up.

«The proposal, not quite three pages long, was stunning for its stark simplicity. It would raise the national debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion. And it would place no restrictions on the administration other than requiring semiannual reports to Congress, granting the Treasury secretary unprecedented power to buy and resell mortgage debt.»

âNew York Times

With just two initiatives, the Iraq War and this Wall Street bailout, W will have spent $1,000,000,000,000 dollars. That's a million million dollars. You cannot be fiscally conservative and approve of W's administration. It's a complete farce.

I understand why this bailout is needed: our ecomony and much of the world's will collapse. The cause of this debacle comes squarely from government regulators not policing the top financial institutions of this country. This is what happens when you "let the market work things out." You get criminal anarchy.

These wall street types and mortgage brokers would knock over old ladies for their purses if it weren't for beat cops.

Our government needs to stop the excesses of capitalism. File this under "promote the General Welfare" clause of the Constitution. This is not an anti-capitalist attitude â it's the voice of experience. Most of the regulatory prohibitions instituted after 1929 to prevent this kind of unprincipaled speculation has been dismantled by Republicans and complicit Democrats over the past 30 years. The boom time of fraud is now over and there's an ugly piper to be paid.

To those who deeply want to have the feds dump social security into private equity funds, I present the summer of 2008 has a magnificent counter-argument to that insanely risky plan.

You may bristle at the imagined ineffeciencies of government programs, but I prefer that to private grift. Call me old fashioned, but I'd prefer my money squandered honestly at the hands of incompetent federal lackies rather than lining the pockets of a few choice cronies.

Investment capitalism, the mechanism that allows financial risk to be distributed over a set of investors, is a fine ecomonic system for what it does. It cannot exist long without government supervision. Marx identified this long ago and no one credible disagrees with his critique: capitalism, without restraint, will eat itself. No country has ever left markets completely unregulated, including this one. The only debate we can have is to what extend the government regulates private wealth. It will and it must. It's have no more non-sense about this from the Grover Norquists of the world.

That our ecomony has been seriously imperiled by the failure of so few companies points to a classic investment mistake: our national assests were distributed over far too few entities. Perhaps the strategy of amalgamating massive financial institution into a handful of companies isn't as wise as it appeared in the past?

Neither McCain nor Obama are well-positioned to comprehensively overhaul our financial system in the sweeping way that's needed. A new "Square Deal" that targets bogus and borderline fraudulent investment vehicles is need to clean up this wreckage of this new Guilded Age. That, and a long docket of indictments against those who put our entire country at risk. That's what's need to restore investor confidence: blood.

Pink Floyd keyboardist Richard Wright has died of cancer. I am a big fan of Pink Floyd and Wright's moody and atmospheric keyboard work on Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and Animals helped make those albums classics.

Thanks for all music, Mr. Wright.

Even though I suspect this is a jab at those who despise the GWB years, I still enjoy the top-level irony of presidency-as-natural-disaster.

Also, it's always good to note that the word "disaster" comes from the latin for "bad stars".

«The root of the word disaster comes from astrology: this implies that when the stars are in a bad position a bad event will happen.»

âWikipedia

Following on the earlier post I made about programming hex maps for games, I have taken a stab at a Java program that generates different sized maps. You can download the zip file here. If you've got a recent version of the JRE (1.5), this should work for you out of the box by double clicking on it. Otherwise, you can run it by unpacking the archive and typing "java -jar HexMap.jar".

This toy just generates hex maps according to adjustable parameters. Hit the "Repaint" button to see the glory.

In a future post, I'll be explaining the math and heuristics I used. I'll also make the source code available then. However, there are better implementations I have in mind for this. Eventually, I should be able to emit an actual game that uses this work. No time, no time. Sigh.

Here's a great article on the law of unintended consequences regarding gay marriage. No matter where you stand on the issue, it's worth reading.

What is the primary difficulty with any law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a women? Many people are not the gender they think they are.

Now, I'm not talking about RuPaul or Divine here. I'm talking about 1 in 1000 people who have never had questions about their gender identity and who appear to have the correct "hardware." The problem is that genetics are not as clear-cut as many conservatives would wish them to be.

So what happens when a man and women get medically tested before marriage to ensure compliance with a mythical "marriage protection act"? Let's say the tests show that the man has XX chromosomes. That is, he is genetically female. Should he be allowed to marry another female? Should he be allowed only to marry a real XY man? Why didn't the Bible cover this edge case?

Personally, I don't care who marries what (other than my wife, whose decision is already made), but there are those who fret about "defending the holiness of marriage."

Of course, none of these brave cultural crusaders is proposing the elimination of such marriage destroying practices of divorce or annulment. That's too wacky.

Rather than defining marriage by gender, I might suggest tests for ensuring that the couple are somewhat more bright than cud-chewing cattle. At least, they should be in order to get a "reproductive" license. Any couple that does not get such license will be promptly "fixed" at the tax payer's expense. Surely, it's far cheaper to address the problems of rampant stupidity as early as possible? I project fantastic savings to the public coffers in the areas of law enforcement, health care and, God willing, the electorate with only a mild controls on the gene pool.

I am available as a write-in candidate for any public office you care to nominate me for.

I confess, I've never really understood much of the social programs of conservatives, especially with issues like gay marriage and abortion. My own life is so full of stuff to do, I don't have a lot of time to worry about what's going on in my neighbor's bedrooms. I have to wonder why gay marriage opponents seem to have so much time on their hands. Not enough bedroom time in their own home, I suppose.

For John McCain, a lot is riding on his VP candidate. He has to show that he's not just representing the traditional rich white man vote. He's also representing the wives of rich white men. And while Gov. Palin's credentials are fine, they aren't are lustrous as those of better known Republican women like Liz Doyle or Christine Whitman. Or, jeez, Condi Rice.

But really, McCain could have had a slamdunk VP in the form of RuPaul who could represent so many minorities at once, he's virtually a val-U-Pak of lefty PR.

McCain-RuPaul: Together, they can dance-dance our country to a better place.

Better luck next time, John.

'Nuff said.

In the software/hardware paradigm that bifurcates humanity, I'm squarely in the software camp. However, I have successful created a CAT 5e run of ethernet cable that goes from the basement to my second floor office terminating in a real, honest to goodness RJ-45 jack in my wall. I couldn't be more proud. If you attempt to install wired ethernet in your home, be aware of the following:

1. Running the cable is the hardest part of the job

If you have a new home, running cable is as easy as getting into the walls before the drywall/plaster is installed. Otherwise, you'll need snake the cable through those unfinished walls in your house, like those found in basements and attics. You could also rip open your finished walls, install the wiring and patch it later, but you're clearly more butch than I. In my case, there was existing speaker wire that went from the basement to the attic. I simply attached one end of a 100' spool of CAT 5e cable to top of the speaker wires with copious tape. I then pulled (carefully) on the wire from the basement to get whatever gravity-assist I could. Your mileage will vary.

2. Get the right tools

You will need an ethernet jack punch down tool. You can get this at Lowes, Microcenter or many other places online. Do not confuse this with a crimping tool, which is designed to fit a male RJ-45 coupling onto the end of an ethernet cable. Punch down tools force the individual wires of ethernet into specific recepticals on the RJ-45 jack. You should not strip these wires before punch down. The act of punch down removes the casing around the wire. Some tools will cut the extra length of wire for you, but any wire cutting tool will work adequately for the job.

You might also need fish tape to help you run the ethernet cable into the hard to reach areas of your wall.

3. Read the mating diagram on the RJ-45 jack

Ethernet cabling consists of 4 twisted pairs of wires, which are typically colored brown, blue, orange and yellow. Each color has a mate that striped with white for a total of eight wires. To attach to an RJ-45 jack, each of these eight wires needs to be punched into the right saddle. Most RJ-45 jacks are sold with a diagram that explicitly shows where each wire goes. Follow the directions carefully. You cannot fudge this part.

4. Unless you have a house older than 50 years old, use new construction low voltage brackets

Low voltage brackets are the bits that are nailed or screwed into the wood of a joist so that the face plate can be attached to the wall. These seemingly simply devices come in a broad variety of forms. One of the dimensions of variation is in how the bracket attaches to the wall. Brackets that have screws or nails go parallel to the face plate
are called "new construction" mounted. Brackets that have nails or screws that are perpendicular to the face plate are said to have "old construction" mounting. I can't really think of a situation where old construction mounting works, but as I said, I'm not a hardware guy. That's also why I bought an old construction mounting first. Live and learn.

It took me three days to do this admittedly simply installation, because I didn't have all the right tools and parts initially.

This is a great project for all you home-owning nerds out there. There are many more detailed web resources out there that explain the process in more detail than I've provided. Also, check out You Tube for helpful videos. There was at least one that shows how to punch down an RJ-45 jack correctly.

Picture of me at the Javaroom in Chelmsford taken with my Macbook's Photobooth app. Compare to the one I took here with my XO.

UPDATE: The Chelmsford Public Library is #^(%ing great. It's clean, brightly lit, full of electrical outlets and WIFI! Of course, PPTP, FTP, SMTP and some other ports are blocked, but not SSH. W00t!

Hex maps, it is claimed, offer a more natural choice of direction for players who want to model open air terrain than the good old graph-paper, cartesian plane, 2 perpendicular axes maps. Graph paper maps do match up well to the four cardinal points of a compass, which is nice. Even better for programmers, these kinds of maps are easily represented with 2 dimensional arrays, a data structure that even grumpy old C supports!

And it's easy to find the neighboring squares in this kind of map. Consider a coordinate system whose origin (0,0) is the upper most left corner of a grid. Going to the right adds to the x coordinate, while going left subtracts from it. Similarly, going down to the bottom of the grid adds to the y coordinate, but going up lessens the y value. If the starting square can be thought of as being at the coordinate (x,y), then neighbors can be found at predictable offsets:

• Northern neighbor: (x, y-1)
• Eastern neighbor: (x+1, y)
• Southern neighbor: (x, y+1)
• Western neighbor: (x-1, y)

It's easy to extrapolate how you could find the diagonal squares too if you wanted to, but that's not desirable for wargamers. There are at most only four equidistant neighbors for any given square on the graph paper map. Sure, you could include the four squares pointed to by the diagonals of the square, but these are more distant from the center of the square than the neighbors at the cardinal points. And that makes wargamers mad! How can you accurately plot the range of your 18th century dutch cannon using only the cardinal compass points?! Hex maps offer up to six equidistant neighbors for any given hex. And that means more accurate pathing for cannon fire. Super!

But how do you model a map in which each element has six neighbors? You could make a linked list of structures that contain pointers to each of their neighbors. But that's not a particularly natural fit and would cause a great deal of programming overhead to populate and search. Is there a way to get all the benefits of a hex map into a 2D array implementation? Yes, there is but you need to to think about a hex map in a certain way.

Look at Figure 1 again, but try to see the map as three columns of hexes stacked on top of each other. Notice that although the first column (with hexes A and D) are horizontally aligned with the last column (with hexes C and F) but the the middle column (with hexes B, E and G) is a bit offset. This is an important detail that will affect our hex map model. We can order these hexes from left to right, top to bottom if we take into account the offset columns that happen every other time. That is, all the odd number columns are offset from the even numbered ones. We can make a horizontal row by starting with a left-most hex. Then, find the "northeastern" neighbor in the odd row. To find the horizontal neighbor of that hex, look to its "southeastern" side. In Figure 1, the first horizontal row is marked out as hexes A, B and C. Continue this alternation until you hit the last column of hexes.

Once we have a predictable sorting order for our hexes, we can use a 2D array to model this map. Why bother with a 2D for a linear list? The answer is that a 2D array naturally maps to the way computer screens are represented in most drawing libraries. 2D arrays also fit easily into an SQL database system. So, even though the thing we want could be represented in a number of ways, there's a lot of convenience to be had in thinking of (x,y) coordinates. So given a hex coordinate, how can we determine its neighbors in a 2D array? The answer is: it depends!

It depends on whether the hex is in a odd numbered column or an even numbered one. Consult the two tables below. I look for neighboring hexes in a clockwise direction starting at the top of the hex (which would be the northern neighbor).

Figure 3: Calculating Neighbors for Hexes in Even Columns

Figure 4: Calculating Neighbors for Hexes in Odd Columns

And for the purposes of this discussion, column 0 counts as even. Does your brain hurt a little? Mine too. Let's make this more concrete.

Using Figure 1, let's create a 2D array that maps the hexes in the right order.

Figure 5: Mapping a Hex Map into a 2D Array

I have included the coordinates of the hex in this table for easier reference. Let's walk through our algorithm to find all the neighbors of each point.

Whew! That's quite a table of mind-numbing numbers! What this table is attempting to show is the neighboring hexes for each hex appearing in the left-hand column. Computations which result in a valid location are shown with that area's label. Computations that produce bum results are shown in italics, just to give you some idea how the edge cases work.

Now that you can easily find the neighbors of any hex, you can implement any of the class of algorithms designed to calculate shortest path, distance, etc. Of particular note, A* pathfinding and shortest distance routines should fall out nicely once you wrap the neighbor calculations into some kind of function.

Which is an exercise I leave for the reader. I realize that modeling hex maps is a solved problem, but I worked this stuff out for myself. Thinking of these sorts of things keeps me off the streets and high on life.

Peace out.

UPDATE: Other people are interested in hex maps too.

Visited Lowell General Hospital today for the first time, in which a doctor looking very much like Alton Brown informed me that my eye was swollen from non-viral conjunctivitis. I get to put jelly in my eye for three days.

So, I have that going for me.

It seems that a few of you are using or trying to use the XML::RSS::Podcast module I published on this blog. As was mentioned there, modern version of XML::RSS do not support the encode function required for generating well-formed XML documents.

That's all changed thanks to Rohan Carly. [Add your thanks to Rohan in the comments.]

I present the complete version of XML::RSS::Podcast below. If you find this module useful, I'll attempt to create a CPAN module for it.

package XML::RSS::Podcast; use XML::RSS; use HTML::Entities qw[encode_entities_numeric encode_entities]; @XML::RSS::Podcast::ISA = qw[XML::RSS]; our $VERSION = q[1.1]; # encode by Rohan Carly # Stolen from XML::RSS::Private::Output::Base; sub encode { my ($self,$text) = @_; return unless defined($text); my $encoded_text = ''; while ($text =~ s,(.*?)(<!\[CDATA\[.*?\]\]>),,s) { # we use &named; entities here because it's HTML $encoded_text .= encode_entities($1) . $2; } # we use numeric entities here because it's XML $encoded_text .= encode_entities_numeric($text); return $encoded_text; }; sub as_string { my $self = shift; return $self->as_podcast_rss; } sub as_podcast_rss { my $self = shift; my $enc = $self->{encoding}; my $output = qq[<?xml version="1.0" encoding="$enc"?> <rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0">]; $output .= $self->podcast_start_channel; for my $i (@{$self->{items}}) { $output .= $self->podcast_item($i); } $output .= $self->podcast_end_channel; return $output .= "\n</rss>\n"; } sub podcast_start_channel { my $self = shift; my @fields = qw[ttl title description link language pubDate lastBuildDate creator webMaster copyright ]; my @image_fields = qw[title url description link width height]; my @itunes_fields = qw[subtitle author summary image explicit]; # Thanks Rohan my $output = "<channel>\n"; for my $f (@fields) { if (defined($self->{channel}->{$f})) { my $s = $self->encode($self->{channel}->{$f}); $output .= "\t<$f>$s</$f>\n"; } } my $seen_image = 0; for my $f (@image_fields) { if (defined($self->{image}->{$f})) { unless ($seen_image) { $output .= "\t<image>\n"; $seen_image = 1; } my $s = $self->encode($self->{image}->{$f}); $output .= "\t\t<$f>$s</$f>\n"; } } if ($seen_image) { $output .= "\t</image>\n"; } # Owner name/email not handled for my $f (@itunes_fields) { if (defined($self->{channel}->{itunes}->{$f})) { my $s=$self->encode($self->{channel}->{itunes}->{$f}); $output .= "\t<itunes:$f>$s</itunes:$f>\n"; } } # Rohan's sub-cat handling code # Expects an array: [category, sub-category] if (ref $self->{channel}->{itunes}->{category} eq 'ARRAY') { my $major = $self->encode(${$self->{channel}->{itunes}->{category}}[0]); my $minor = $self->encode(${$self->{channel}->{itunes}->{category}}[1]); $output .= qq[\t<itunes:category text="$major">\n]; $output .= qq[\t\t<itunes:category text="$minor">\n]; $output .= qq[\t\t</itunes:category>\n]; $output .= qq[\t</itunes:category>\n]; } return $output . "\n"; } sub podcast_end_channel { return "</channel>\n"; } sub podcast_item { my $self = shift; my $item = shift; my @fields = qw[title guid pubDate description link]; my @itunes_fields = qw[author subtitle summary duration keywords explicit]; my $output = "\t<item>\n"; for my $f (@fields) { if (defined($item->{$f})) { $s = $self->encode($item->{$f}); my $perma = ""; if ($f eq "guid") { $perma = qq[isPermaLink="false"]; } $output .= "\t\t<$f$perma>$s</$f>\n"; } } if (ref $item->{enclosure}) { $output .= "<enclosure"; for my $f (qw[url length type]) { if (defined $item->{enclosure}->{$f}) { $output .= sprintf("$f=%s", $self->encode($item->{enclosure}->{$f})); } } $output .= "/>"; } for my $f (@itunes_fields) { if (defined $item->{itunes}->{$f}) { $s = $self->encode($item->{itunes}->{$f}); $output .= "\t\t<itunes:$f>$s</itunes:$f>\n"; } } return $output .= "\t</item>\n"; } 1;

For an example of usage, please see the previous post cited above.
Report bugs in the comments or through email. Thanks.

I saw George Carlin on stage three times â once at the Cape Cod Melody Tent, a prime venue. Mr. Carlin's comedy was formative for me as it was for many people. His Occupation: Foole album was the first comedy album I'd ever heard.

Many comedians benefitted from the doors he open with his racy stuff. Lenny Bruce is rightly credited with being an earlier adopter of blue language into his routine, but Carlin made the rough stuff palatably rather than merely raunchy and angry.

His political stuff was always a decade ahead of the pack. As he drifted into his golden years, he didn't mellow, but became more pointed on his attacks at the establishment. He was the very icon of what stand-up comedy means to me.

The seven famous words on his web site sum up it best: we love you and we'll miss you.

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

Finally, a meaningful survey on the web (via classicaljunkie).

Don't let their size fool you: these critters are dangerous in numbers.

I have bought my first house. It's the biggest thing I've ever bought and it will require more care and feeding than any pet I've owned.

On the upside, I now have the right to vote and smoke old guy cigars.

Level me up one.

After five years, Leostream is finally got a careers page with [EDIT: some] content on it. The times, they are a-changin'!

If you're a self-motivated developer interested in working in the virtualization market (which is ridiculously hot right now), please consider sending your resume to Leostream. You'll find all the particulars on the company web site, but I can list some of the things we're looking for in an engineer:

• C++ or Perl. These are the two primary development languages we use. C++ for Windows dev and Perl for Linux dev. Java is also a nice to have.
• You need to understand socket programming and networking cold. I don't care if you can actually resolve the address space of a given netmask, but you should know what a netmask is.
• You should have some experience with RPC mechanisms and XML-RPC/SOAP in particular.
• At least understand what a virtual machine is. If I said, "what's a VMX file", you should know that it's the VMware config file for virtual machines. If I said "VHD", you should think of the MSVS/Xen virtual disk format.
• You have to be self-directed. Leostream is growing fast and you'll need to puzzle out a lot of details for yourself. Of course, that's not to say there's no support for new developers. But, you'll need to keep your own task list up to date. :-D
• Tolerance for start-ups. Leostream does not have the amenities of larger companies. If that's important to you, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Also note that I'm not the hiring manager. Please do not send your resumes to me.

Cheers.

One of my former O'Reilly colleagues has passed away. Erik T. Ray died last week from complications due to a biking accident. He was 38.

Erik had many interests aside from his chosen profession of programming. If you've watched The Gameshelf, you've probably seen him (he was on twice as a player). Erik wrote two books for O'Reilly, Learning XML and Perl & XML. At some point in the last five years (all of which are somewhat hazy to me now), Erik approached me to co-author a Ruby on Rails book. Unfortunately, my schedule wasn't amenable to book writing at the time.

Erik was a sweet guy. A man of his dimensions could easily have bullied his way through social interactions, but that wasn't his way. Intellectually curious, Erik was frequently cobbling together things, whether through coding, writing or more substantial media.

Erik, you will be missed.

Sally and I watched a lot of the new Battlestar Galatica yesterday. We're nearly through Season 3. While it's an engaging story, I do find the plotting and character arcs somewhat arbitrary. It's not a "hard scifi" epic I know, but still I don't want to hear about networked computers and firewalls when I'm not working. Call them "analytic machines" and "logical ramparts" and I'll be happy.

When there's more time, perhaps I'll write a more complete criticism of the show. There are things it does very well, but it still feels a little flat to me overall.

UPDATE: Just finished season 3. Very disappointed. The character arc of Baltar just isn't believable, Apollo continues to careen wildly from one life decision to another without a lick of continuity, and the revelation of long-time characters being Cyclons was literally a random choice by the writers.

Here's a little tip for R&D: If you're going to write a series with continuity, you have to bloody plot out the series before you start. That makes it possible to plot the seasons and then the shows. If you write the shows "on demand," you end of with confusing plot twists and inconsistencies that ruin the whole story.

What a bunch of hacks.

Does this mean we're now fiercely less independent?

Enjoy!

Dear Internet,

Because I'm currently homeless, I do not have regular access to my taskboy.com email. If you need to reach me, please use a different address. If you don't know what that address is, I'm not telling you here.

That is all.

UPDATE Because of this fabulous article, I can read taskboy email again! I'm at the cutting edge of 1991 tricknology!

Even though I would prefer Mr. Obama, I'm reasonably sure now that John McCain will take the White House in November. And I don't think the race will be close.

The Democrats are now polarized into two camps. One of those camps must loose in the candidate selection process. That loss will embitter the other camp, who will not vote on election day. Thus, the Republicans, who would not have had enough support to take the election, will find that their smaller base will be enough for victory.

I believe now that Ms. Clinton will get her party's nod and will fail miserably in the general election. I think Mr. Obama would do only a little better.

The only way for the Dems to win in November, short of McCain eating a baby on live national TV, is for a Clinton/Obama ticket. This conclusion is glaringly obvious, but egos are likely to prevent it from happening.

Fortunately, there's not a big policy difference between the Dems and the GOP in this election. However, there's a lot of house-cleaning that needs to be done that the Dems could do easier than the GOP (who caused a great deal of chaos in DC from 2000-2008).

«Now, you have to understand the way she said that, because it's the key to the whole project. The spirit of everything was formed within those nine words - and if she'd said them shyly, as though having her breasts touched by people was something to be endured or afraid of, the Open-Source Boob Project would have died aborning. But she didn't. Her words were loud and clearly audible to anyone who walked by, an offer made to friends and acquaintances alike.

Yet it wasn't a come-on, either. There wasn't that undertow of desperation of come on, touch me, I need you to validate my self-esteem and maybe we'll hook up later tonight. There was no promise of anything but a simple grope.

We all reached out in the hallway, hands and fingers extended, to get a handful. And lo, we touched her breasts - taking turns to put our hands on the creamy tops exposed through the sheer top she wore, cupping our palms to touch the clothed swell underneath, exploring thoroughly but briefly lest we cross the line from 'touching" to "unwanted heavy petting." They were awesome breasts, worthy of being touched.

And life seemed so much simpler. »

These fourteen-year-olds sure have a lot of moxie. I mean, going to a

convention, blogging, meeting girls and everythingâ¦

What? HE'S THIRTY-EIGHT?!

Creepy.

update:

I tried to reply to Springheel Jack's post about this, but he's got aggressive comment filtering on. That's a shame as that reduces the quality of the discussion. And as arguing on the Internet makes us all dumber, I'll just note I had some dynamite stuff to add that's now gone.

lj: 1
jjohn: 0

Sally and I are moving into the burbs. I couldn't be happier.

Leostream is moving offices too. Also good.

However, both moves have been scheduled for the same day.

I'm a sad panda.

There are two utilities I've found that let Windows users manage files on EXT-2 (and so EXT-3) filesystems.

The first is a filesystem driver that let's you mount EXT-2 drives just like any other VFAT, NTFS drive. Appears to work like a champ.

The other is a less invasive tool that allows you explore EXT-2 filesystems without mounting them.

I have a network filer running linux with RAID-1, which is great. I have a SATA drive in a USB enclosure for backups. Now, I can directly access the backup drive from Windows, should the filer fail.

EXT-2/3 is nice because it handles large files and large capacities. VFAT just can't handle the new drive capacities without magic (even though the linux vfat drive can handle 300GB drives without complaint).

This dude reminds me of Gnat Torkington. And it's not just because he talks funny.

Although the XO laptop is constrained on memory (256M), it has a lot of hardware features.

I shoved a 2GB USB drive into the XO, along with an apple keyboard and an MS optical mouse. I wanted to record a video with the Record activity, but I was low on disk space. Most of the pre-installed "activities" save files in /home/olpc/.sugar/default/org.laptop.[ACTIVITY]. I simply repointed org.laptop.RecordActivity/instance to /media/KINGSTON.
That gave me room for videos. Unfortunately, the RecordActivity seems to allow only 45 seconds of video to be recorded. That's not really true. It only offers you 45 seconds. Since most of the sugar UI is python, and the RecordActivity is python, I was able to add the following to /usr/share/activities/Record.activity/constants.py:

DURATIONS.append(600)

That changed the UI to allow 10 minute recordings.

I'd like to hack the UI to tell me the filename of the recording. That's not too much to ask, is it?

Also, I'm using my emacs blogging tools from the XO to write and publish this. That means I had to shove Perl and GPG on here. It's getting pretty crowded on the 1GB drive.

Another note to jjohn: since you can't figure out how to import keys into gpg, just move the *gpg files in the blog project to where gpg expects them. Not you. No one cares where you think these files should go. This is the second blog post I've had to make to you about this. Perhaps you need to write an article about using GPG so that you don't forget again? Still, GPG bets the hell out of X509 certificates. What a bureaucratic nightmare those are.

The silly D&D character generator I built does not print the character sheets any more. I'm trying to figure out why. It worked like a champ for a while.

UPDATE: I appear to have fixed it.

Also see this article for even more goodies.

Amazingâ¦

UPDATE: Wait, it gets better. Hack the registry to force an automatic login. Seems like someone will create a .REG file to do thisâ¦

I'd love to control the bookmarks and links in the PDF output, but that's why there are professional applications to do that.

The cost of the Iraq war in American servicemen lives has crossed the rubicon of 4000. This appalling number does not factor in Iraqi or American civilians.

This hideous war that began with fiction cannot be won, denied or escaped. It is a cancer that will consume our American society to the same degree as the Vietnam war, although it will take more time to do so.

America is in Iraq primarily because of our energy policy has failed to change since 1953. Our dependence on oil gives other nations the tools to harm us. Our failure to plan sustainable long-term economic strategies mean that we need a choke-hold on energy supplies to stop "old" Europe, Russia and China from getting too uppity with us.

There was a time when America was respected by the World as an example of hard work, innovation and decency. But that was a long, long time ago.

Although I warmly welcome a change in American leadership, I do not think anyone but the Iraqi people can extricate us from our national hubris.

See you again at 5000.

Bloggers of liveJournal unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

Or something.

Personally, I think every blogger (including me) should take a break from clogging the Intertubes with chatter. The idea that blogging is anything but vanity is dishonest.

As for the reasons for the strike, they are misguided. The users of LJ feel some ownership of the system which they were never promised. If you want content freedom, rent your own server.

As for my content on LJ, I've been on strike for quite some time.

Congratulations Nate and Kim!

Well, here I am at the Javaroom in Chelmsford with my XO. It's a cool, if underpowered little device. It continues to draw more attention than even those fancy mac Air notebooks. I think its the lime green rabbit ears. Or maybe it's my own rabbit ears.
The file upload HTML widget works weirdly on the Browse Activity. Recall that the XO attempts to hide the filesystem from the user and instead has a "journal" that remembers everything you did. So the file upload, instead of presenting a file chooser dialog, presents this weird version of the journal.

Must get firefox on this bad boy someday⦠Still, I can blog from my XO.

Jumpin' horny toads! It's a new pseudo ep! This time Mike and I are in the studio together and you can feel the tension like it was Brokeback Mountain. Spook laser weapons, menacing seeds and eye teeth are in the crosshairs this show.

Also, there's a bonus clip of Star Trek fan boy jawjacking!

Don't let wild wolverines keep you away!!!1!one

As most nerds will have already heard, D&D godfather and Wisconsin native E. Gary Gygax has passed on.

By weird coincidence, I have been re-reading many of Gygax's missives written for Dragon Magazine in the 80s and he would certainly qualify for the title of "Internet Crank" had the Internet been around in its current incarnation at the time.

Later, I'll have to post a bit of his rant on why Tolkein's LoTR has nothing to do with D&D. Gygax goes futher to claim that he couldn't even make it through the series, although he did like The Hobbit.

His pendantry for both English grammar and medieval weaponry foreshadowed my own encounters with the IRC channel #perl very well.

Gygax was a man of strong opinions and modern nerd culture would be quite different with him.

Mr. Gygax, thanks for the rulesets.

Hey, Windows Users!

Are you annoyed with the seemingly constant prodding from Apple to upgrade your iTunes/Quicktime installation with newer updates? Ever been typing away happily in an application only to have Apple's nagware grab your keyboard and mouse focus away?

Stop being a victim and fight back!

You can disable this misfeature at the root. Click on your trusty Start button and get to Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks. Your screen will look something like the screenshot above. Either delete the AppleSoftwareUpdate item all together or simply disable it by right clicking on the icon and going to Properties.

Push verses Pull technologies: I think we know where I stand on this issue.

Think Londo and G'Kar in Aught Eight. Patriots and Statesmen both. And willing to take one (be it an eye or a Keeper) for the team. Leadership you can trust.

I'm waiting at SFO for my flight back to Boston. I'm about 6 hours early. Well, I wasn't that early until my flight got delayed. Then I switched flights. bah.

As I'm on a business trip, I'd like to note how badly business folk get ripped off on trips. After health care, it's America's most important crisis.

Also note that I'm blogging this from my XO laptop. Apparently, it works with tmobile just fine. The keyboard is pretty unusable for any serious work.

Wish me luck.

UPDATE: Given the time on my hands, I started playing with this XO laptop. Amazingly, I was able to install the pptpclient from Fedora without too much trouble. That means, given a more solid net connection, I could use this laptop for business as a thin client! Wow.

I also installed Doom and SimCity. Where's my O'Reilly interview?

It's 2008 and I'm full beyond the questions "is America ready for a black president" or "is America ready for a woman president." I'm dismayed that old feminists and old civil rights activists are lockstep in their support for candidates based on race and gender. It's just dumb. These United States so desperately need adroit and wise leadership that the old battles of race and gender should seriously be put aside.

I would like to see Barak Obama as the Democratic candidate. Further, I'd like to see him elected president because I believe all the other candidates are far too tainted by special interests to make the hard decisions that will face the next administration.

D&D 4ed. Cartoons.

Man, they didn't have these in my dayâ¦

This clip is messed up.

The graphic above shows the number of pages served per year. Nice tread, eh? Maybe it's time to slap some Google Ads on this puppy and CASH OUT!

I looked up the word "utopia" in my Webster's 8th Collegiate dictionary last night. The root of the word is related to "topic" or "place". I thought that the prefix meant "good", as in "eugenics", etc. That is not the case. The prefix "u" is Greek for "not", which makes the translation of utopia "no place," which I got a kick out of. Also, let's not forget XTC's album "Nonsuch", which refers to the plans for a beautiful castle that was never built.

Cynicism: it's baked into the language.

UPDATE: As passerby noted, I was error about Nonsuch. I was perhaps mangling a memory I had of Andy Partridge talking about it. Rock stars and their damned lies.

Dear Internet,

Happy holidays and may the new year bring peace to this small blue marble. It's not much, but it's all we have.

Dear Internet,

For no reason more than nostalgia, I'm looking to buy a copy of the TSR minigame "Revolt on Antares". If you've got a complete, usable copy of the game that you'd like to sell, please drop me an email (jjohn [at] taskboy dot com). I'm not looking for a collectable, near-mint copy.

Thanks!

UPDATE (Jan 12, 2008): After a nerd-fisted slap fight on eBay over a near-mint version of the game, in which the bidding when over $100, I decided that I'd try Alibris, which has a used copy in an unknown condition for $27. Who's laughing now, TSRwhore88?

Even when I win, I lose.

FINAL UPDATE: I received RoA today and was pleased to find all the counters still attached! Near Mint, baby!

I'm writing this from my new XO laptop, from the One Laptop Per Child project, which I'm not linking to, out of sloth.

While the UI takes a while to get used to, this device is a great if your looking for a portable terminal. It reminds me favorably of the Mac Classics.

I'll post more about this remarkable device later. For now, I want to play with it!

Today I am 36 years old. As has been my tradition, I jot down a few thoughts for the public and the future on passing these ordinary milestones of life.

To say that this year saw significant changes in my life is a gross understatement. Not only did I move out an apartment that I had occupied for 12 years, I moved in with the woman I was to marry. I wore a kilt for the first time this year. The company I work for, Leostream, moved to larger offices. I had my first vacation in Jamestown this summer.

Not all changes have been good though. I lost a cat, Tempest, and my mother, Pat Johnston, to cancer. A second cat (of the original three) also has cancer. There was a host of other deaths of important family and friends this year too. All of which has put me in a reflective mood.

As a remembrance of things gone by, I post this picture from 1953 of my mom with her siblings and who I suspect are her maternal grandparents. I was very close to not only my mom but her sister and brother. As of December 2, everyone in that picture has passed on.

The fifties where the formative decade for my parents (who weren't hippies or beatniks at all). In many ways, they attempted to inculcate that same culture to my brothers and me. Most of those lessons could be boiled down to:

• The Golden Rule
• Don't be burden on others
• Mind your own damn business

More than ever, I feel the responsibility of being an adult more acutely than ever before. I've got more than my personal budget to deal with now.

I expect even more changes personally and professional next year.

Duty now for the future.

blink blink

Wha-haup-pinned?

Also see:

Funny thing, Atari Space Invaders. It's mind-numbing in its simplicity and yet I love to play it for as long as I can. It's perhaps the best realized game of the original batch of Atari 2600 titles. At some point I'd like to more formally contrast Atari's invaders with the original arcade version (which the NES aped), but that's a tomorrow project (for the gameshelf?).

Anyway, in a game without much point, a favorite meta-game is to see how many times you can "roll the score". As you will remember, the score in the 2600 version of this game only goes to 9999. After that, the score is reset to 0000.

In my day, you had to make your own fun out of the video games that were available.

Anyway, tonight I managed to die just as I rolled the score. I've never ended a game with 0000 before. Where's my gold-plated gladis of victory?

I'm considering licenses all of the music content on this site through creative commons. It's already free to download and I've never refused anyone the right to reuse any of the material.

Anyone have any thoughts about this? Any hidden downsides to this kind of licensing?

Update: I've updated the licensing on the music page. I've also updated the ID3 info on each file so that there's some link back to this site. I'm the cutting edge of 1999!

«This all begs the question: what does the future hold for Leostream, which is the last remaining standalone connection broker vendor? Will another hypervisor developer, or perhaps another management ISV, make a move to snap it up?»

âTrading Markets

python -m pdb [script]

That is all.

Despite not wanting to put overly personal things in this space, I wanted to announce this bit of news once to avoid repeating myself.

Pictured above is my Mom, Pat. On November 15th, I brought her to the hospital because she was complaining of "feeling off." She had trouble speaking. She could not find the right words to express herself.

After a number of tests, it was confirmed that tumors in her brain were causing some of her discomfort. She had had undiagnosed lung cancer for some time that had spread to her brain, adrenal glands and lymph nodes. She was a life-long smoker.

For such an advanced stage of cancer, there is no treatment.

This week, Mom will be going to a nursing home that will attend to her final needs, which amounts to morphine. She can no longer speak and doesn't appear to be eating. We expect the end soon.

Over the past few weeks, my brothers and I have been very busy putting her affairs in order.

If you wish to send your condolences to her, please email me and I will provide you with the contact information. I would ask that you not try to visit her, as she will likely be sleeping when you arrive.

Thank you for your support during this time.

UPDATE: Mom passed at 3:30A on 12/02/2007. Rest in Peace, Mom.

UPDATE: Mom's obituary will appear in Sunday's Boston Globe and Cape Cod Times, 12/09/2007. No funeral is planned (her wishes), but a memorial service will be announced later. In lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation to the American Lung Association in Pat's name.

From Urbaniak's liveJournal.

More early Pete Gabriel madness. Also a plus for those who think samplers are too complicated these days.

From Pete Gabriel's 1978 solo tour. So much energyâ¦

Mike and I proudly present a new episode of PseudoCertainty that covers new Planets, old arguments and weaponized dung. Also, fish-on-fish violence. What's not to love?

A funny retrospective on the banality of video games from a wacky Brit.

Hey kids! There's a new Gameshelf out (ep. 6) about economic games. The ones reviewed are Acquire and M.U.L.E.

In other gameshelf news, I recently reworked the gameshelf theme as bumper music. It's sort of a cross between Enya and Christmas music â not too interruptive.

I hate blogs about weddings and that includes my own. I'll simply note that I'm grateful to all who attended an exceeding blustery service. The day went by in a blur. I'll eventually post the wedding pictures in the usual place.

Many asked me what I was wearing beneath my kilt. The subject line of this blog was my answer. :-)

Remember: Gas is virtually unlimited!
It makes the world go round! And, gas is so much more efficient than the alternative: gunpowder-fueled engines.

Hats off to Rube for sucking some cash out of of the automobile-oil complex.

Yes, complaining about the mediocrity of Star Trek is akin to warning about the fall of the Roman Empire, but still, something needs to be said about it.

All the Star Trek stuff written after 1984 varies between first- and third- rate fan fiction. I just finished watching the end of the movie "First Contact" (not to be confused with the TNG ep of the same name) and was awash with nausea. The movie was as edgy as a mid-season episode of Lassy or Touched by an Angel (a title that holds nigh-infinite promise for pornography).

Also note this gem of plot from Wikipedia:

In Pocket Books' non-canon DS9 Relaunch novels, Ezri remains on Deep Space Nine but moves from counseling to command, receiving a promotion to lieutenant and becoming executive officer of the USS Defiant. Following a mission on the Trill homeworld, she and Bashir end their romance but decide to remain close friends.

Whah? People can break up and "remain close friends"? A councelor can be promoted to a commander? What the hell kind of outfit is the Federation running anyway? How did the Klingons fail to beat these chuckleheads anyway?

Let's give Data emotions and promote Troy to Lord Governor Militant of Federation. Wait! Let's give Beverley Crusher command of her own "medical" ship. She's probably qualified, right?

Just awful. Jim Kirk, I'm glad you weren't alive to see what became of your beloved Federation.

Also see this blog for new ways in which to understand the original series.

UPDATE: Why on earth were comments disabled on this important entry?

UPDATE: Fixed. A typo in the DNS recored hosed me. Sigh.

Dear Lazyweb,

I have a few Dell PowerEdge 2450's and 2650's that I'd like to boot through a Wake on LAN facility. However, I cannot figure out where in the BIOS one enables WOL.

Perhaps one fine readers could point in the right direction?

Note: these are eBay machines, so I don't have the original install disks.

Thanks in advance, emergent intelligence bio-mechanical entity called "World Wide Web."

For no particular reason, I'd like to record my preferred order for tackling the minibosses at the beginning of the NES game Megaman 2. Pay close attention.

1. Airman: Use your shooter
2. Metalman: Use your shooter
3. Woodman: Use metal blades
4. Bubbleman: Use metal blades
5. Crashman: Use air attack
6. Heatman: Use bubble attack
7. Flashman: Use heat attack or shooter
8. Quickman: Use crash bombs

If you follow this order, you should have all the special weapons you need when you need to get 1UPs and other goodies.

Good hunting.

Because I misread my flight information, I'm trapped at beautiful Logan International Airport for several hours. I'm on my way to San Francisco for my third VMWorld show.

It's a pretty gray day out the windows of the food court in Terminal C. It's a hot one too, but I know this through reports. The AC in here keeps the climate nice and cool. Along with Internet access, there's little less I really need for the day. Of course, a coach would be welcome for a napâ¦

U of Rochester reports:

Scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute have discovered a copy of the genome of a bacterial parasite residing inside the genome of its host species.

You'll never believe this, but I've been pondering a scifi story that features parasites that do exactly this. It's not fair that science as stolen my cruddy idea and I expect to be compensated for it.

Here is a long-winded scare comic about the dangers of the Dungeon and Dragon's role-playing game. It's from 1984. The main gist is how playing around with fake magic diminishes one's faith in Jesus.

A few things:

I don't play Pen and Paper RPGs anymore (but I did in 1984), but I continue to be irritated by bible-thumpers who still villify the game. I never summoned a demon or "mind-controlled" my parents while playing this game, but I did improve my SAT English scores.

Is D&D worse for Christians than, say, Doom, in which you stalk humanoid monster in the dark and slay them by the hundreds? Perhaps the masturbatory Tom Clancy games of counter-terrorism are more Jesus-friendly? After all, you get to kill the non-believers by the dozens.

(P.S. Marcie, sorry about the death of Black Leaf, but if she couldn't find a simple poison trap, she was no damn use to anyone. Consider not playing Thieves with DEX scores less than 17.)

This is my current hobby. It's giving me a much clearer understanding how to actually use assembler to do common programming tasks. While there is little call for 6502 programmers these days, I feel like I can better understand general purpose CPU programming now.

This code is a moderate hack of the kernel code shown here.

;; Built with: http://www.atari2600.org/DASM/DASM22010b.zip ;; bin\DOS\DASm.exe playfield2.asm \ ;; -IDASM\Machines\ATARI2600 \ ;; -f3 -v5 -o..\ROMS\a.bin ;; processor 6502 include "VCS.h" include "macro.h" PATTERN = $80 ; first byte of RAM SHAPE = $55 BGCOLOR_ADDR = $81 BGCOLOR = $0A BGTIMER_ADDR = $82 BGTIMER = 40 PLAYFIELD_COLOR = $0 TIMETOCHANGE = 20 SEG ORG $F000 Reset ;; Zero out RAM, TIA ;; RAM - $80-$FF ;; TIA - 0 - $7F ldx #0 lda #0 RAMLoop sta 0,x inx bne RAMLoop ;; ââ- ;; Init playfield ;; ââ- lda SHAPE sta PATTERN lda #PLAYFIELD_COLOR sta COLUPF ldy #0 ; animation clock lda #$10 ; Remember, ; high nibble ; is read ; backwards sta PF0 lda #$80 ; Entire byte ; read backwards sta PF2 lda #$01 sta CTRLPF ;; setup the bgcolor stuff ldx #BGTIMER stx BGTIMER_ADDR ldx #BGCOLOR stx BGCOLOR_ADDR stx COLUBK StartOfFrame ; Start of vblank processing lda #0 sta VBLANK lda #2 sta VSYNC ; 3 scanlines of VSYNCH sta WSYNC sta WSYNC sta WSYNC lda #0 sta VSYNC ; 37 lines of vertical blank ldx #$CA VertBlank inx sta WSYNC bne VertBlank ;; Playfield animation iny cpy #TIMETOCHANGE bne NOTYET ldy #0 ; reset ani clock ;; bit shift the pattern asl PATTERN bne NOTYET ;; Reset pattern lda SHAPE sta PATTERN NOTYET lda PATTERN sta PF1 ;; Change the color by adding ;; the aniclock tick to the ;; base color clc tya adc PLAYFIELD_COLOR sta COLUPF ;; 192 scanlines of picture ldx #$C0 MainPicture sta WSYNC ; strobe Wait for Sync dex bne MainPicture ;; Is it time to change ;; the BG COLOR? dec BGTIMER_ADDR bne LOAD_BGCOLOR ;; Yes - restore timer, ;; change color ldx #BGTIMER stx BGTIMER_ADDR asl BGCOLOR_ADDR bne LOAD_BGCOLOR ;; Reset BGCOLOR ldx #BGCOLOR stx BGCOLOR_ADDR LOAD_BGCOLOR ldx BGCOLOR_ADDR stx COLUBK ;; Vertical Blanking lda #%01000010 sta VBLANK ; 30 scanlines of overscan⦠; #D2 = 226, 256-30 ldx #$D2 OverScanLoop inx sta WSYNC bne OverScanLoop jmp StartOfFrame ORG $FFFA ;; Interrupt Vectors .word Reset ; NMI .word Reset ; RESET .word Reset ; IRQ END

I'd like to make some playable game for the atari 2600 some day. That would bring my childhood dreams to life.

Here's what I want:

• First item
• Second item

This is a pretty basic application of ID selectors and that nutty img() function in CSS. Even though you could view the source of the is page to see how it's done, I'll just escape it here for the lazy:

<style type="text/css"> #nav { width: 300px; font-size: 12px; line-height: 20px; } #nav UL { list-style-type: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; } #nav LI { width: 100px; background: #DDD; background-image: none; list-style-type: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; } #nav A { width: 100px; display: block; } #nav A:hover { color: #CC3; background: #CFC; background-image: url(img/arrows.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: right; } </style> <ul id="nav"> <li><a href="first.html">First item</a></li> <li><a href="second.html">Second item</a></li> </ul>

Notice that the width for the #nav A element and the #nav LI element should agree. I wish there were a more generic way of setting this size (I suppose some fancy javascript could do it), but since I intend to use this for navigational stuff, this is just fine for me.

This code was tested in IE and Firefox.

A new PseudoCertainty podcast is now available. You'll have to decide which is creepier: a 30-minute discussion of the last Harry Potter book or maggots living in your head. Both are covered in this show.

If Charles Bukowski wrote Peanuts, it would look a lot like this.

If you are using the Perl module XML::RSS in the following way:

my $R = XML::RSS->new; foreach my $url (@urls) { my $content = wget($url); $R->parse($content); }

In older versions of the XML::RSS module, this code worked fine. However, if you have upgraded the module recently, you might have noticed the error message:

Modification of non-creatable array value attempted, subscript -1 at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/XML /RSS.pm line 792.

It is not the feed that has gone rancid on you, but the library. Try instantiating a RSS object within the loop like this:

foreach my $url (@urls) { my $content = wget($url); my $R = XML::RSS->new; eval{$R->parse($content)}; if ($@) { warn("Parse error: $@"); next; } }

I've added some "exception" handling for free in this example so that parse errors don't blow up your program.

I'm afraid I did not dive into XML::RSS.pm to figure out the problem, but if someone with that knowledge wishes to post below, I'm sure won't be the only one who welcomes enlightenment.

Just finished the last Harry Potter book last and it was delightful. Many of my suspicions about Snape were well-founded, but Albus's back story was even more interesting.

The number of deaths of familiar characters in this book is a little staggering.

The one complaint I have is that there just wasn't enough space for the minor characters to shine. In this book more than the others, it was a non-stop harry-palooza.

One more complaint that's a tiny spoiler: that Harry breaks a Taboo after knowing fully of its existence was just silly.

Till, the Potter series is very likely to enjoyed by Children and adults for many years to come.

Well done, Ms. Rowling!

This is an abbreviated primer to remind me of this common, yet difficult to find documented, procedure.

The problem: You have an Active Directory domain with groups of users on it that you want to allow to log into varies local machines through RDP.
You have tried to add the domain group to the local "Remote Desktop Users" group on a target terminal server, but you cannot do this through the Manage Computer MMC.

The solution: use the net command on the target machine like this:

Assuming you have RDP enabled on that machine, you should be able to RDP to it and use the credentials of a user in the domain group you just added to log in.

I know what you're thinking: "why not just add the domain builtin group 'Remote Desktop Users' to the local group?" You cannot add domain builtins to the local groups. I think this has to do with the underlying LDAP schema of AD. The "net localgroup" command is looking the CN=Users sub-tree of AD, it seems. Put your OU or groups in there.

Of course, this solution makes you visit each target terminal server/desktop. You could script this with ssh or, more Windows-y, WMI, I think. You might even be able to do this stuff with Perl or python to visit all the machines too. There's also a Group Policy manager from Microsoft that should make this easy to manage central, but I couldn't get that software.

HTTP ERROR 584:
YOUR BROWSER IS TOO GHETTO FOR OUR SITE PLEASE GET A REAL USER AGENT, HIPPIE

Sighâ¦

;-)

The Boston Globe reports:

«In a YouTube video posted on Mr. Butch's MySpace page, he offered a buoyant view on how to live: "You got to be articulate every day and keep going on strong and straight and use your heart and all your might and all your weight and all your power. Do what you can, make it last for many hour, 'cause once you're dead, you're done, you don't come back," he rapped, pausing before adding, "Yeah."»

As a waiter at the Kenmore Square Uno's, I remember Mr. Butch and the equally memerable "Mixed Nuts" air guitar team that frequented the area. I'm not sure I would count myself as an admirer of his bohemian lifestyle, but to each his own. He certainly appeared mostly harmless (but really, really baked).

Freak dancing

• Just finished three weeks of federal jury duty last week. Now under the meaning of "don't make a federal case of it."
• Sally has finished remodeling the kitchen with Ikea stuff. Looks fantastic. Note: my girlfriend can beat up your girlfriend.
• Took Sally to see the Blue Man Group for her birthday. It's still a great show!
• Many things are going on professionally. Should be able to talk about them some day.
• Getting more comfortable with Python. Bought the Python Phrasebook, which is a great idea for a book series. These books are somewhere between a reference guide and a cookbook.
• Am reading Stephenson's Diamond Age. I still don't care for cyberpunk lit very much. It's written for teenagers. Boo.
• Have ordered Dawn of War: Dark Crusade because those Necrons look awesome.

«Above all, we may benefit immensely if science proves, at last, that self-righteous indignation is an addictive, self-doped drug high. Imagine how moderate problem solvers of all kinds will be empowered, when they can point to yammering indignation-junkies at every end of the political spectrum, and tell them to get help.»

The Mushyheaded Middle rages against the machine.

The error looks like this:

Dumping under names emacs and emacs-21.4.1 make[1]: *** [emacs] Segmentation fault make[1]: *** Deleting file `emacs'

This is caused by a recent linux kernel feature called Exec-Shield.

The easiest way around this error is:

./configure && setarch i386 -R make

You can also run just the setarch bit after the original make dies.

I blog this simply to spread the word out. I'm not smart enough to have fixed this on my own. :-)

Picture taken: Coney Island, May 2007

Just an update for those keeping track: my girlfriend Sally is washing the hand soap in the bathroom.

No word yet on what sort of soap soap she's using to get the soap clean.

Will post an update when I learn what she uses to clean the soap that cleans the soap she's cleaning now.

E_RECURSION_TOO_DEEP

In what is sure to become a fan-favorite blog game on taskboy, let me introduce: Collectible, Racist or Both. It's the game where I post some bit of obscure art and you comment on whether what's presented is collectible, racist or both. Ready? Let's start!

The Black Americana selection of kitchen oddities for the modern home offered by Texas Belles is, in the only word that comes to mind, stunning. I have seen such knick-knacks before as a child while being dragged around to various antique stores by my mother in the Northeast. However, I'm gobsmacked to learn that such effigies of racist folklore are apparently still being produced.

It does occur to me that there is a weird way in which one could view this collection that's not wholly offensive. I have read several Viking romances and in them, real nationalities are often portrayed as non-human. The Lapps are usually some hairy dwarfs and the Permians are all witches and wizards, it seems. I wouldn't feel too bad about having a grotesque Lapplander dwarf statue on my lawn because the image is so ridiculous that it cannot be taken to refer to real human beings. In a similar way, the very outlandishness of the Black Americana stuff can only be taken to refer to antebellum mythology rather than current racial attitudes.

However, this admittedly fine distinction might not be entirely clear to the casually viewer of such trinkets and so I eschew them.

What do you think? (The correct answer will appear soon!)

(Originally found through Substitute's blog)

UPDATE: The answer to this question is (highlight to read):

I know that you've all been looking for an updated version of the BASIC program that appeared in (1982) Dragon #74 to generate D&D characters, so I push aside my important work to complete this awesome, gold-plated first edition rules, D&D character generator!

It's multi-user, for the web! It even allows you to store and edit an entire Rogues Gallery of NPCs.

All the values are accurate according to the 1981 rulebooks. The real kicker is that character homelands are assigned from pools of locations keyed on class and alignment. Now who's laughing at all my Gazetteers?

Don't all rush to thank meâ¦

UPDATE: In case there wasn't enough retro-fun here, I've added a feature to this generator so that your character stats get written to a scanned character sheet. Now you can face your DM with pride!

This page contains a truly great hack to force XP's disk manager to offer disk mirroring.
Microsoft frequently disables functionality to distinguish their products from one another. The difference between NT workstation and server was a few registry keys. Here, the hack is a little more complicated, but not for emacs or vi users.

Of course, you will want to back up the original files. And this hack voids warantees, etcâ¦

Note that the change in dmconfig.dll isn't quite right. There should be only 4 null bytes after WINNT, not 7. This changes the file size and the offsets. Very bad.

UPDATE: Happy 1000th post, taskboy.

I woke up early this morning and starting reading about A* pathfinding, which led me to implement a binary heap in Python.

Once again, I've been playing with python for game programming on Windows. I'm up to atari 2600-level games now. Yay!

Compiling python scripts in .EXE files is extraordinarily easy, which makes shipping a python game to a machine without python installed possible. This is a huge advantage over Perl. Even the dependent libraries used by called modules are bundled easily.

I'll start posting some of my python work as soon as I create modestly interesting game.

UPDATE: For those interested in 30 seconds of Atari-like fun, I present Stubby Falls Down (3MB Windows Installer).

Last night, JMac, Lee, Joe C. and I filmed a very special episode of the Gameshelf in which we all learned an important lesson about green screening.

SCAT studios has a green curtain that's about twenty feet long. Although we have used this in the past, last night we took the time to set the beast up correctly, which meant hanging from the pipes! Because the screen didn't quite reach the ground, Jason and I sat on not one but two risers. Holy nosebleed seats, Batman!

Despite some fatigue and technical problems, the shoot went well and I'm sure the rest can be fixed in post.

The rumors are true: Spinal Tap is playing at Live Earth. I have seen SP play and it's worth the price of admission.

If you really want to know who toppled the Soviet regime, do not look to any American president. Together, Boris Yeltson and Mikhail Gorbachev brought down the Iron Curtain and atttempted to drag Russia into the Twenty First century kicking and screaming. Although this process continues today, these gentlemen that open the door for change.

With the fall of the U.S.S.R. also came the end of talk about Mutually Assured Destruction via atomic suicide. Just in case you feel that Yeltsin never did anything for you, here's a one thing you've got going for you.

Yeltsin was by no means perfect and his faults were well publisized. His decision to use force to put down the Chechnyan rebellion with force will certainly counterbalance the heroic image of him standing on a tank in front of the Kremlin. There is no recent American analog to this image of a (furture) president personally endangering himslef for his country in such a pronounced way. Maybe JFK during WWII? H. W. Bush was a pilot during WWII and Ike commanded D-Day, but these don't seem as personal as JFK's PT boat adventure.

While I'm glad Yeltsin was not an American president, he still should be remembered by all Americans.

With this report of a possible NASA gunman at Johnson Space Center, let me officially publish my theory (that belongs to me) that global warming is driving people out of their minds.

While my evidence for this is slim, I find the frequency of alarming reports unsettling.

I posit that climate change has reached a noticable level and that our ancient monkey minds are screaming mad trying to warn us to flee. Of course, there is no where to flee, thanks to our broken space program.

Doomdoomdoomdoom.

Yet another school shooting has happened and obligatorily the suggestion that we all strap sideirons to our belts is proffered as the solution to protecting ourselves from danger.

Was the Old West safer because of pervasive gun toting? Was Rome, Athens or Sparta safer because daggers were everywhere? Surely, medieval Europe is the very model of personal security?

The very ease which the psycho at Virginia Tech obtained a weapon is a large part of why this disaster happened. The other, more omnious reason is simply that the dude wanted to kill. There's little that can be done to stop the lone gunman.

If you think that you would have been able to "drop" the gunman had you been there with a weapon, I'd take odds that you would have failed. It's very difficult to perform security under fire. Trained police and military forces have a hard enough time doing it.

Gun advocates implore us not to trust the government to save us. To an extent , I agree with them. Citizens need to do a certain amount of disaster preparation (see Katrina). However, you don't need to worry about the odd gunman/terrorist/revenuer.

Events in which you are faced with an armed opponent are outliers. Worry instead about drunk drivers and bad weather.

[Note: personal gun ownership does not scare the government into following the Constitution (they have much bigger guns), but voting sure does.]

From Gamasutra (registration required):

«When I first started writing commercial game code, my code was liberally littered with comments, and I couldn't imagine any drawbacks to this. As time passed, I noticed something odd: the code and the comments grew increasingly out of sync, and I found that wrong comments cost me more time than correct comments saved me. The cutting and pasting, and late night alterations that happen when the pressure's on all meant that the code changed while the comments didn't.»

I couldn't be more in sync with the sentiments of this article. Copious comments can breed laziness. Debug code! If the code is hard to understand, rewrite it!

The AFTH movie is nearly out. This is not a joke.

UPDATE: It's out now!

«It's your lucky day! I'm giving away an original Nintendo Entertainment System with three cartridges: Super Mario Bros. 3, Krusty's Funhouse and The Mafat Conspiracy. Includes AC adapter and RF adapter for old sk00l TV fun.

The Catch? I don't know that the console works anymore. I didn't spend a lot of time debugging the problem. The carts probably are OK. I'm not interested in shipping this stuff (around 10 lbs.), but if you are serious about it, we'll do some further negotiation. Otherwise, we can meet in a public place for a drop off.

So, if you need spare NES parts, dinner is prepared!»

If you are interested, email me directly.

UPDATE: The NES is taken. Sorry Horny 4 NES. Maybe next time.

Dear Red Sox Nation,

Try to enjoy Opening Day without me. I know it will be difficult. My thoughts are with you.

That is all.

From the L.A. Times:

«Los Angeles has the largest intact, though now dormant, movie theater district in the nation, having lost to the wrecker's ball only three major palaces: the cavernous Hill Street at 8th and Hill; the Paramount at 6th and Hill, a glorious Crypto-Egypto-Mesozoic pile of poured concrete with a Spanish exterior so solidly built that the contractor hired to tear it down lost his shirt in the process; and over on Main Street, the California, its elegant Beaux Arts facade never altered, not even its marquee, until it was replaced by a parking structure.»

Where to begin? Kudos for using a colon to denote the start of a list and using semicolons as list markers for long, comma-containing phrases. However, this technical achievement has produced a train-wreck of prose that's so dense and unwieldy that only sex-starved matrons from the Victorian era would enjoy teasing the content out from this mess.

If a writer cares a wit for his reader, he will not subject them to long, streched-out sentences so chocked full of complex descriptions of list items that the original sentence is utterly obliterated. Let's see if we can clean this up a bit.

Try as I might, I cannot fit in the additional information about these ancient theatres into the new paragraph in good conscience, since this article attempts to review the movie Grindhouse, not give a survey of L.A. movie houses. It's true that some fascinating details (and word count) are lost in my version, but I think it reads better.

What do you think?

I saw the following image while looking at google news today. Very appropriate for the subject. The U.S. needs a multi-billion dollar space-based missile defense program as much as a fish needs a bicycle. Still, I enjoy cold war imagery as much as the next person of my mature stature.

After many more hours of work than I had at first thought, I have moved out of my apartment in the Fenway, which I had first rented in 1995 for $775/month.

I've shed more than half the mass of my belongings, including clothes, linen, out of date tech books, paperbacks, very old school papers, two working but bulky CRT monitors and decrepit furniture. It's a surprising good feeling to shed the dead weight of the past, though my future biographers will berate this decision.

The fens have changed a lot in twelve years and I suppose so have I. With the incredible amount of construction that's happened in the last five years, a Starbucks has finally appeared in the neighborhood.

I can't say that I knew many of my fellow fenway residents nor did I partake in local events as much as I would have thought. In particular, I regret not going to the MFA more and never making it to the Gardner Museum. However, the Fens remain an excellent home base for exploring Boston and even Cambridge (Harvard Square was merely a 45 minutes walk away; Kendall about 30 minutes).

I had a good run in that apartment, which was my home for longer than any other place I've lived. Still, I can't help thinking how I moved in as a young man and left middle aged. I suppose that will happen if you're not careful.

«I found Propero's product to be much too complicated; it seemed as if the application was really designed for something else and acting as a VDI connection broker was kind of an afterthought. Leostream's product, on the other hand, seems really streamlined and really focused on the CB market. »

Thanks for using the software, Scott!

This is a reminder to myself.

If you need to reset the IP address of the HP LJ printer named in the subject line, turn on the printer with the JOB CANCEL button pressed for 7-10 seconds. More troubleshooting can be found here.

Great scene, great acting.

Been playing with OpenID. It seems like this could be useful for web-based games. Even networked games generally.

I've added my openID header to my LJ page. Perhaps I'll make taskboy some kind of openID server.

Hey, hey, kids! What's that sound? Why, it's a new episode of Somerville Cable Access TV's The Gameshelf coming at you at the speed of fun!

Grab the show from iTunes or direct download (340MB), or just wait a bit for the upload to Google Video.

In this episode, Jason kicks out the video production jams to cover the fascinating card game of empire building called Citadels and the party game that invites close friends to lynch each other, Werewolf.

If that's not enough, the show begins and ends with music by me!

Any way you slice it, it's gotta be good!

UPDATE: Watch the sense-shattering conclusion to this episode right here!

«Folks, you can't run a reputation-based system in a mosh pit at a Debbie Gibson concert.»

âSean Burke on wikipedia's "nobility" clause

In the space of barely three months, I have finished reading all six of the currently published Harry Potter books. I must say that the series is impressive.

At the end of the sixth book, I do wonder how younger readers will take the very dark turn in the story? Perhaps, this is another case of "the old underestimate the young."

I'm curious how the story will resolve in just one book, but it should be entertaining.

Dear Internet,

I have posted and will post more pictures to this flickr set of behind the scenes photos from Jason McIntosh's Gameshelf show/podcast.

That is all

Jason McIntosh has decided to go with one of the theme songs I wrote for The Gameshelf.
This theme is featured in the promo above.

My conquest of all media has been outsourced!

Mike and I just finished another pseudocertainty show via SkypeOut tonight. Two hours of talk time was under $4, which works for our show's budget.

We talked about Atlantis (lost city of), the nutty astronaut who drove to Florida in diapers, 1-31, the Doomsday clock and vault, and much, much more.

I'll try to cut that up tomorrow.

UPDATE: It looks like there's about 20 minutes of extra material concerning Harry Potter. I'll have a regular 60 minute cut and release the extra bit as a "web exclusive" bonus. Of course, it's all web exclusive content, isn't it?

Punxsutawney Phil predicts an early spring this year through his history-tested method of looking for his own shadow.

Of course, we've always been a nation of narcisists, but I didn't realize that the fauna was in on it too. I suppose it must be something in the drinking water.

You can find more of these tasteful icons of 9-11 rememberance here.

Terrorism strikes Boston again, but this time it's the children who are

the targets.

I'll just link to Sean

Burke's blog

since he's got the whole AP story.

No, I wasn't hurt. And no, I didn't get any of these electronic ads. If I

had, you can bet I would have placed these items on eBay by now.

Update: Mooning is not a crime.

Update:

Get the shirt here.

âWar Nerd

Good old War Nerd embraces his inner bastard while reflecting on Hussien's execution. Again, no tears for Saddam, but it's sad to see the U.S. engaging in nineteenth century colonial justice. It's bad for business.

Here's a screenshot of Jason McIntosh and I on the set of the next Gameshelf. True fans of the show will notice that during the next episode, jmac and I use the same jacket. Which one of us wears it better? You decide!

It amazes me that spamers target random HTML forms, such as those found on this site and others that I maintain. I believe I've mentioned this before, but still, WTF?

Right now, the form in which users can suggest an RSS for the feedbag is getting battered with bullshit suggestions for viagra. Sigh.

For a consultant, vacations are not baked into the job. But this week, I'm going away to Cape Cod with Sally to enjoy some much needed R&R;. Whether this means more blogs or fewer, I cannot say.

What a weird week of deaths. It almost sounds like a grim joke. "OK. So, James Brown, Gerry Ford and Saddam Hussein die and meet on the banks of the River Styxâ¦"

James Brown lived so hard, he was almost a cliché. I enjoyed his music, but I'm amazed the man didn't kill himself with his lifestyle earlier.
At first, the bruhaha surrounding the lock-out of his last wife from their home surprised me and then I thought: that's totally rock and roll to the end.

Gerry Ford lived longer then I would have expected. I have only vague memories of the '76 election in which he was defeated. The country was pretty down on Ford, I think, but I don't believe he was particularly stupid or unusually corrupt. Watergate and Vietnam made a lot of folks depressed and paranoid. Sadly, we could have used a lot more of that old thyme-y cynicism in 2003 before invading Iraq. I wish Ford had spoken more publicly about current politics during the last thirty years, but that's not what old soliders seem to do. Colin Powell appears to be similarly afflicted.

Of course, had we not invaded Iraq, we couldn't have hung a 69 year old man. Hussein was a giant prick, to be sure. From the biographies I've seen of him, it appears that Hussein's early life was that of a street thug who happen to bully his way into politics. However, I'm deeply ambivalent about the death penalty. When the state kills one of its citizens, it loses the moral high ground against murderers. On the other hand, sometimes a body just needs a-killin'. Execution is an undeniably effective way to prevent recidivism.

Let's hope the new year dials down the "suck knob." Perhaps this mashup of Benny Hinn will help.

Spiderman is my favorite Marvel superhero, so I'm pleased as punch that a stupid Internet personality quiz confirms my fondest desire. It must be Christmas!

Fear is a potent weapon. Animals use fear both as a defensive tactic (by growling, shaking a rattle, bearing teeth, etc.) and as a defensive strategy by running away from things that scare them. Fear, in itself, isn't a bad thing at all. Fear is our first line of defense against danger.

However, irrational fear is a crippling affliction. The world is full of potential harm and to attempt to protect yourself from all of its dangers will paralyse you. Anyone suffering from clinical anxiety will tell you how damaging irrational fear is.

When politicians promulgate irrational fear, my upper lip starts to twitch and sweat. Weaponizing racism and xenophobia corrodes our national character and turns us against one another. Fear has never bred decency.

This lesson can be learn, once again, from Virginan Representative Virgil Goode, whose last name is so ironically villainous as to be a clichè. Goode isn't what one would call a multiculturist.

«"I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way. The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran."» [1]

Goode is referring to his counterpart Keith Ellison ("now they are taking our last names to blend in with us!"). Ellison insisted on taking his oath of office on the book of his faith, the Koran. Goode is pissed about it.
However, Ellison's request isn't without precedent. Goode is making political hay of it, though, and that's disgusting. We do not insist that Jewish representives swear oaths on a Bible.

If I had my way, I'd do away with the the holy books in oath ceremonies entirely and make people take oaths on the Constitution. If a congressman doesn't consider that document important enough for oaths, I don't really want them to have his job.

Goode considers Ellison the vanguard of some Muslim conspiracy, it seems:

«"[Ellison is] a serious threat to the traditional values of the nation"» [2]

I don't exactly know what threat Goode is referring to. I assume he has a lot of time on his hands to be looking for new, hidden conspiracies since all other problems facing Congress have apparently been resolved. Oh wait, no they haven't.

We've been told many, many times that our war on terrorism isn't a war on Islam, but many in the Middle East aren't so sure about this. Presentative Goode's comments make it hard for the U.S. to engage and pursuade the rational Muslims of Iraq, Iran, Syriah and the rest of the Fertile Crescent that U.S. foreign policy is really in their best interests too.

What's worse, xenophobia turns our backs on this nation's defining characteristic: cultural pluralism. We can argue about what's the right number of immigrants to allow into the country each year. We can argue about how to deal with illegal immigration. We should not be talking about what creeds or ethnic groups to exclude from our national life.

We have always benefited from the "brain drain" of other countries who chose to make the lives of their educated middle class difficult. Immigrants from Europe, Russia, Iran, Turkey, North Africa have all contributed to the American way of life. We should be slow to shut door on those who can help us make a better country.

I would ask Mister Goode to stop pandering to our basest fears of "the other" and wake up to the reality of globalization. Unless "globization" is just a stand-in for "American economic empirialism." In that case, you can count me out.

I'm not a pagan, but due to the meager daylight budget afforded the Northeast in the autumn, I'm positively deLIGHTed that today is the shortest day of the year. From now on, I can expect more light even if that also means more snow.

Note to Druids: collect your holly leaves tonight for maximum efficacy.

On the eve of my thirty-fifth birthday, I recorded this song, seasick. I wanted to get a more live feeling to the recording, so it's not entirely in time with the click. I like the way the guitars came out and I think the vocal performance is more interesting than not.

The "ship creaking" noises came from the wooden floors of my apartment. I simply slowed down the samples and lowered their pitch.

Team B was a group of U.S. policy wonks that focused on the Soviet threat from the 1970s to the mid-1980s. I suspect that they would have happily continued focusing on the Soviet threat even after the fall of the U.S.S.R. because Soviets are just so much fun to hate.

You will probably recognize many of the technocrats involved in this group: Richard Peale, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Ed Teller to name a few. If you said that this group prefigured the neocons of the twenty-first century, you wouldn't be far off. Team B was that shadowy group lurking in the backrooms of D.C. whispering doom into the ears of Republicans like Ronald Reagan.

Do read this Boston Globe piece on the memoirs of former Team B leader, Richard Pipes ("you don't need to be a Dick to be on Team B, but it helps"). Pipes had lived through Nazi-occupied Poland and was rather down on totalarianism. And yet in 2003, he didn't think highly of the plan to democratize Iraq:

«Democracy requires, among other things, individualism â the breakdown of old clannish, tribal organizations, the individual standing face-to-face with the state. You don't have that in the Middle East. Iraq is tribally run.»

This from a man whose group advocated a nuclear first strike against the U.S.S.R.

Team B was fed highly sensitive intelligence about the Soviets capabilities and intentions for atomic warfare and were convinced that Ivan was ready to lauch a first strike against an admittedly hostile and aggressive NATO. They were also convinced, without a gossamer of evidence, that the Soviets had a kind of stealth atomic sub that was invisible to sonar and, presumably, waiting off the coasts of the U.S. for their launch orders.

Team B was charged with thinking "outside the box." Apparently, that box was the one that included verifiable facts. Paranoid, sci-fi fantasies based on real U.S. black budget military projects seem to have been well-trodden territory for this thinktank.

Anyone with passing familiarity with Russian history should not have been surprised by the Soviet's aggressive defensive posture. Getting invaded repeatedly over the centures seems to make people a little touchy about their borders.

Of course, there's a fine line between a siege defense and expeditionary force. You have to imagine that there was a Soviet counterpart to Team B who would have been the kind of loonies that the American Team B were afraid of. It's not hard to see how this paranoia can become amplified by a hall of mirrors on both sides of the Cold War. Each shadowy group would have been convinced that the other was ignoring détante policies based on Mutually Assured Destruction and instead was planning how to win the ultimate zero-sum game.

Although Team B has long since disbanded, it's members and even it's paranoia continue to poison our "post-9/11" world. History is important, since it is the only guide we have to the future. Know who told me that? Newt Gingrich. No joke. If that's the case, old Newt would surely agree with Pipes's criticism of Paul Wolfowitz:

«Paul didn't have much education in history. It's not his field. He was educated as a military specialist, a nuclear weapons specialist. Like most scientists, he doesn't have a particular understanding of other cultures.»

Fortunately, Paul now has a job without touchy-feely problems like "culture." He's the current head of the World Bank. I'm sure his noted cultural sensitivity will used as successfully there was it was during his tenure as Don Rumsfeld's Deputy Secretary of Defense.

We are all doomed.

You know what would make a great video game?
Forced prosyletization of non-Christians and rock stars.

Cashing in on the best selling and brain-melting Christian-fantasy porn called Left Behind (no, I'm not linking to that crap; find it yourself), some schmucks created a sort of real-time "first person saver" game in which you convert (or shoot) non-believers in an effort to feel good about your imaginary friend in the sky. It's called "Left Behind: Eternal Forces," which is appropriate since the forces of stupidity are as deathless as dread Cthulhu.

I fully enjoy the Tom Clancy angle to the game's title. There's nothing like replacing the adrenaline rush of Cold War M.A.D. with violet religious bigotry based on a unctuous interpretation of Revelations.

Sure, there are those weak, degenerate liberal Christians would have you believe that conversion to Jesus worship should be voluntary, but they're just pussies.

It seems that there will always be those theists who pine for a homogenous religious culture. I don't really understand this desire. When has a culture with a hegemonical religion been a really great place to live? We already have that situation in the U.S. and it's called Salt Lake City. If that's your idea of paradise, you can get really cheap tickets to it from Jet Blue. If you don't like deserts, I invite you scenic South Boston where you don't have to be Irish and Catholic to live there (you could also be Catholic and Irish too), but you'll sure be hated a lot less if you are.

Real, fact-based agenda people know that allowing and embracing diversity leads to a more pleasant, healthy, creative and productive society. There's just something darn helpful about someone calling you on your delusions that moves a culture forward. When everyone agrees with each other about too many things, you pretty much get the Taliban in Tragikstan.

Hey, I know! Why not make a game in which you shoot the zombies raised by Jesus after the Tribulation? Call it "Left Behind: Not on my Watch." You could get Charlton Heston to do voice-over work for it. Make it an massively multiplayer online game to boot! That would kick ass!

Happy Birthday, me!

On Decemeber 12th I have, as I have had for the last 35 years, a birthday. If last year's didn't convince me that I'm no longer young, this one makes the point more insistently.

Since I'm likely to be very, very busy until then, I post about this monumental event now.

Still, things in Joe Central aren't all that bad. I have a delightful girl friend, reasonably good health, many good friends and a ever more prosperous business. All these have to count for something.

UPDATE: Today is the 12th and it's a fine, fine day.

UPDATE: Got my present from Sally: a hoodie that says "Awesome since 1971." And you know? That's absolutely the case.

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I've been really, really busy with work. I've created my first Java GUI wizard for installing Virtual Applications on to ESX 3, which will be more useful than it sounds.

Oh, I guess there was some kind of holiday too in thereâ¦

A remix of an old track Without You is now available for mass consumption. Remixed with better audio equipment, new synth patches and a new organ track, I hope this track will be received with all the attention it so richly deserves.

Well, I'm here in sunny Los Angeles, CA at the cavernous LA convention center with Leostream. The show is big: 6,000 attendess. Just the logistists of getting food to that many people is impressive and makes me glad I'm not in the food service industry.

We had a lot of drama setting up our rather complex hardware for our demo. However, a bit of duct tape and a stream of blue language seem to set things right.

Last night, as a VMware partner, we got to a party in Hollywood near the Chinese Theatre. That was pretty weird. Even the hobos were over the top! So much for show biz.

Looking forward to dinner tonight.

Because I can't do anything original, I copied Sean Burke and pulled my old posts from use.perl.org into taskboy, complete with the right post dated.

Now Taskboy is the COMPLETE REPOSITORY FOR WORLD KNOWLEDGE about all things Joe Johnston-ish.

Today is Halloween. You should go have some harmless fun. Unlike the idiots who broke my girlfriend's car window on Sunday. That wasn't fun at all.

Also, be nice to witches today. Wait until tomorrow, All Saint's Day, to burn them.

Dear Internet,

On this Samhain eve day, I'd like to remind all writers of email intended for American audiences that there are only three punctuation marks that properly end complete sentences: the period, the exclaimation point and the lone question mark. Using some remixed version of any of these to end a sentence in a business email automatically flips the Bozo bit for most readers. The most heinous of these freestylin' punctuation marks to my eyes is the Triple Hooks ("???"). Here are loathsome examples of its usage:

I know this is a broad and ill-defined question, but does your product scale???

Since I work for a university, can I have a free licenses for your expensive product???

I know you don't offer phone tech support, but could you call me right now???

I need a username? and a password???

Serious, non-clown people don't need the Triple Hooks to make their point. They expect the reader to return the courtesy of a carefully composed email with a close and attentive reading of their missive.

Clown-people, on the other hand, do not read well at all. They are constantly distracted by horns going off, rainbow fright wigs and fitting into over-subscribed passenger vehicles. They can't be bothered to read a lot of prissy sentences. They need to get on with their important clown-business! To this end, they employ special clown-punctuation in their own emails to tell them which word fragment to gawk at.

Now that's C-business moving at the speed of the Interclownwork!

For the casual writer, I encourage you to use whatever symbols you think will help you express yourself. I think the percentage sign and circumflex are aching for more time on the page. Please do restrain your grammatical phreaking in business correspondance.
Your reader (and I) will be glad you did.

And that's why there's no key on your keyboard with "???" on it. Learning is fun!

«You have a particular definition of god which i think is not normative.»

Richard Dawkins, a fundamentalist atheist and author, has a new book out called The God Delusion. It looks at religion as a social phenomenon and makes some predictions and admonishments about our attachment to what is patently irrational. Sadly, Dawkins was in town a few weeks ago and I missed him. I would have enjoyed going to his reading.

While this book is not on the top of my current reading list, even though I'm a fan of Dawkins' work, I do enjoy reading the reviews of it. It's the lazy way to feel smart!

From one such review on Uncertain Principles comes this bit of insight:

«The modern versions of the "ontological argument" for God may be awfully intricate, but they're not really any worse than the loopholes in experimental tests of Bell's theorem (in fact, divine intervention is probably about as credible an explanation of the results as some of the proposed loopholes). Ridiculous and complicated as they may seem, those are the arguments that need to be addressed, in the same way that a new Bell's theorem experiment would need to deal with the faintly absurd loopholes that remain in the existing experiments.»

It's a sad, sick world in which we, as a culture, still need to debunk a priori arguments (i.e. the pure-reason logic constructs referred to as "ontological arguments" made by Olde Timey authors like Decartes).
Why do I have to waste my time explaning why the crap in your head is irrelvant to the mechanical nature of the universe?
Just because you can't "imagine a being greater than which no greater can be conceived" only proves your cognative limitations and suggests limitations on all human thinking. And if you accept the limits of human cognative ability, you might find a priori arguments as a class of persuasion even less cogent.

Like Vegas, what happens in your head, stays in your head.

Looking at some of the "classical onotological arguments" for God, I shudder at the utter remoteness of them. They explain nothing. They predict nothing. The do not expand our understanding of life, the universe and everything. They move civilization forward not one jot. Cavemen learning to beat each other about the head with giant sloth bones was, as an achievement for the species, more productive.

Interestingly, one of the comments on that review points to a more philosophical rebuke of Dawkins:

«Again, not to harp on the point, but Dawkins' citations suggest that if children aren't indoctrinated into their parents' religion they will amost certainly accept some other superstition. In this case Dawkins seems to be assuming a naive sense of free well, as well as a tabula rasa conception of human nature. Among atheists there is an old joke that all children are born godless, but eventually indoctrinated into believing in gods. But science is science, and the works that Dawkins references in the first half of his book produce a great deal of evidence that children are 'natural theists.' So a child is not turned into a Christian or Muslim from the state of non-theism, but rather inculcated in a specific set of beliefs slotted on top of their innate religious sensibilities.»

What's fascinating to me (and points to my own general dullness), is the idea of studying religion as a natural and social property of humans. Stripped of its emotional baggage, religion is an enormously important social activity that merits full scientific investigation. The mythology of religion, of course, does not.

I'll have to pick up Breaking the Spell one of these days.

If you haven't checked it out before, take a peak at PseudoCertainty, which is a podcast I do with Mike Lord about all things weird. There's a new show available now which you can also get through iTunes.

If you're already a listener and enjoy the show, please to write a review on iTunes about it or link to the web site from your blog. I'd love to get the word out about the show.

And while I'm plugging things, I'd like to recommend JMac's Arcade, which is a video blog/essay about Jason's life set to 80s video games. Jason is a great writer and you'll find his short videos entertaining.

Unreleased Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Watch.

Now and forever.

If you don't believe in the existence of Giant Squirrels, you can be forgiven. Most people, confident in the world as defined by the press and vids, do not.

However, there are a few unhinged and untrustworthy advocates who claim that this man-sized rodent from the Old World are literally true. They claim that these beasts are possessed of a cunning so remarkable as to be mistaken for human.

Of course, this is most certainly the rants of a unsettled mind, yearning for order in a unplanned and mindless universe.

«The leading star alpha Her, called Ras Algethi (arab.: kneeler's head), is a red supergiant (spectraltype M5Ib-II). Its brightness varies erratically from 3.1 mag to 3.9 mag. A small telescope reveals a second star of 5.39 mag (physically not related to the other). This 'companion' is a binary consisting of a G5 giant and a F2 main sequencec star (not resolvable by amateur scopes). The brightness of the variable star S Her varies every 307 days from 5.9 mag to 13.6 mag. It belongs to the same class of variable stars as R Ser. The varibale star SZ Her is a eclipsing binary. Every 16 hour the fainter component dims the brighter from 10.2 mag down to 12th mag. The eclipse has a duration of about 90-100 minutes. Tom Polakis observed this star and printed a lightcurve.»

Also see:

«Though the brightest of its stars is only middling second magnitude, the constellation as a whole is fairly prominent. Rather oddly, Rasalgethi, the Alpha star, is the fifth brightest, perhaps because it is a bit south of the main constellation pattern. The name means "the Kneeler's Head, in reference to an early name for the constellation, the figure of the man seen upside down, his head toward the south. Though of the third magnitude as seen from Earth, the star itself is magnificent, a reddish giant or even supergiant with a surface temperature of about 3000 degrees Kelvin. At a distance of about 400 light years, Rasalgethi to the human eye is almost 500 times more luminous than the Sun»

There are several small, rocky planets between the orbits of Ras Algethi and its binary neighbor. Technically, these worlds orbit the binary pair, but Ras Alegthi is hard to miss in their skies.

In the Earth year 3001, a colonizing expedition was sent to one of this rocky worlds, which proved rich in mineral resources. A mining operation was established, but transporting this bounty back to earth became unpractical.

 I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore! 

âNetwork

Albert Finney's famous line from Network rings true for all of us at times and for me that time is now.

I've got two nagging problems in my life. I'm lucky to have only two. One is my student loans and the other is my weight, which has become a problem again.

The first problem can be solved with money. And since I've got enough, I decided now is the time to repay my debt. Although my net worth won't change, I will enjoy an extra couple hundred bucks a month from now on.

Sallie Mae, I'm not your whore anymore!

The second problem will take time and money to solve, but I have resolved to so starting today. My approach to weight loss has always been low-key. I consider it a waste of valuable sittin'-around time.
My goals this time around are a lot less intense than the last time I did this (I lost nearly 50 pounds then). However, I do take the long view in gauging my results, which helps the process.

With luck, I'll start 2007 with less choleric and monetary debt.

A curious blend of evangelical Christianity and hard-nosed
science, the Academy serves the mining colony as a source of technical skills and moral guidance. Over the years, the Academy has grown in wealth and influence. Some have argued that it has overstepped its original charter, but those within the Academy claim that they only go where they are asked.

In my continuing quest to implement hot technology from the year 2000, I've created an RSS aggregator.

This application is more than a rehash of Rael Dornfest's Meerkat, which I miss.

I'm very fond of Firefox's Live Bookmarks, but I don't always have my computer with me. This way, I can get to the important feeds from any machine.

All VC funding offers should be directed to the email at the bottom of this page. The gravy train is pulling out of the station!

I'm also working on a sort of Wiki for Taskboy, but it's not quite ready for prime time yet.

This will be the default page for the Taskboy wiki. It will rule and garner lots of attention. By which I mean eyeballs, ad revenue, power.

Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself.

Here's a @@welcome|link@@ to another page

Howdy! Welcome to my Wiki here on Taskboy.

This system is built on top of the existing Taskboy blogging software to provide me a place to jot down ideas I need to keep in an organized fashion. What sort of things am I talking about?

• Story ideas
• Tech book ideas
• other ideas

Because of the personal nature of these topics, I'm not allowing general write access to this thing. Nor am I tracking changes (since I won't be getting into revert wars with myself).

What I do hope to borrow from other Wikis is the specialized syntax that will help produce automatic internal hyperlinks to tags. I'm thinking about using to do this syntax:

@@<tag>@@ or @@<tag>|anchor@@

This syntax is similar to Wikipedia's.

For instance, I could link to tag names like @@wiki:Maintenance@@ or quoted tags like @@"welcome"@@. Or, I could do something fancier like @@wiki:Maintenance |this link@@.

In the end, I think an article should get at least one distinguishing tag. I'm not sure about this though. It seems onorous.

Let's see how this goes.

Of course, I'm not following the URL standard, but hey, I don't care. :-)

This is Mike Lord. You may know him as Zorknapp. Or, you might know him as the tireless higher education worker trying to make student's lives at college just a little bit more comfortable.

But, if you're reading this, you probably know him as Zorknapp.

For some, the infinite sequence of decimal places generated by the ratio of a circle's area to the square of its radius that we call π is extremely provocative. I'll confess that the subject has some interest for me.

When you hear that a number doesn't end, that it cannot be completely represent by any means known to man (or at least this man), then you might start to think that this number is as close to magic as we're likely to come in this mortal coil.

That said, there are many ways of calculating π.

One popular thought experiment is to imagine what sort of messages are contained in π. People have been encoding messages with numbers and other symbols for many centuries. One could argue that the alphabet itself is just a symbolic encoding of thoughts anyway.

Does π have a message for us?

Well, it might and it might not. You'd have to figure out how the message is encoded. What's the alphabet of the message? What language do those letters belong to?

In the computer world, there is a popular mapping between numbers and letters called the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (take THAT, XML!), abbreviated ASCII. In ASCII, capital "A" is represented by the decimal number 65, lowercase "a" is 97. These numbers represent the character's order in the list of 128 characters that compose basic ASCII. The word "dog" is presented by the ASCII sequence of decimal numbers: "100111103". In the programming language Perl, you could find this out with the following snippet:

printf("%s", join("", map { ord($_) } qw[d o g]))

Is the ASCII sequence for "dog" contained in π? It's certainly possible.
The sequence is short compared to the decimal places in π.
Since I don't have the the means to generate π with any accuracy, I can't tell you the offset in sequence of decimal numbers in π that "dog" appears. However, I'm pretty confident it is there.

Of course, there may be other encodings lurking in the limitless parade of numbers in that magic ratio. One method popular for encrypting messages these days is called Public Key Infrastructure(PKI), which uses a prime number raised to the power of another prime number. The product of such an operation is very hard to factor (having only one correct solution). If you give these numbers to a friend, she will be able to decode your messages fairly easily. However, if your message is intercepted by a ne'er-do-well, he will have a hard time finding the right magic numbers to unlock your missive.
There are other transcendental numbers known to us. Perhaps these are part of a galactic PKI encrytion scheme? Perhaps π really is some universal truth encoded in such a way as to challenge sentient beings.

The decimal numbers in π are thought not to repeat themselves. In emperical tests, this appears to be the case.
However, we can't know that the number doesn't repeat until we can either generate the entire number or come up with a fancy, mathematical proof that explains the behavior of these never-end decimals.

One jumping off point for the philosophical meandering about π is to think that if this number generates an infinite sequence of non-repeating numbers, then π might be nature's random number generator. If that's the case, then you might be tempted to think that any sequence of arbitrary size can be contained in the π.
If your imagination is wild enough, you might be tempted to be believe that there is a numeric representation of the universe contained somewhere in π.

This sort of thought leads a lot of freshman math majors to soil their bed sheets.

The unsettling conclusion to this idea is that π is either a numeric "backup" of the universe or perhaps it is the blueprint of reality. Both of these notions imply an automaton or purely natural universe. By this, I simply mean that all processes of reality have a non-supernatural cause. This will no doubt make some uncomfortable. If the accepted rational view of the universe's origins is true, then at some point, something "beyond" nature had to be, since "nature" didn't exist prior to that. But perhaps math did and these special numbers are a relic of that pre-relational universe. It's an odd paradox and one that Dr. Hawking suggests is the product of fundamentally flawed thinking.

But that's gets into the nature of time and that's a completely different essay.

What is most interesting about π is, perhaps, not the number at all, but how people react to it. It's a number that promotes cosmological thinking in those that consider it deeply. Perhaps π is like the monolith in Clarke's 2001 in that the more we attempt to interact with it, the more it tells us about what we are.

The Chicago Tribune reports:

«QALAT, Afghanistan â U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan war against Taliban guerrillas can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the Islamic militia and its supporters into the Afghan government.»

I thought the U.S. wasn't going to support non-democratic regimes anymore? Shortest policy reversal ever?

Without the Iraq distraction, the US could have rebuilt Afghanistan properly, for less money and acrimony and even had a reasonable chance of catching bin Laden, who's probably keeping it real in Pakistan.

Apparently, the U.S. can't "cut and run" in Iraq, but doing so in Afghanistan and even welcoming back into power those people that supported the 9/11 attackers is just fine. Why? Because rooting out terrorists is hard!

Had a Democrat recommended this, Bill O'Reilly or Ann Coulter would have branded him a traitor and called for his deportation.

Madness.

I officially call on our leaders from both sides of the political aisle to stop sucking so hard this instant!

Let me begin be saying: I'm not a business executive. I've never started my own business (yet). But I have seen and read a few things that have lifted the scales from my eyes regarding business.

Business is about customers. Successful businesses have them; unsuccessful ones don't. If you want to succeed at business, you need to understand this first. VC Ron Garret
says as much and from the very excellent education I've gotten from working at Leostream, I believe him.

Start-ups don't get funded for having great ideas, a superior product or even a competent management team (although I recommend having all of these, if you can swing it). People with money have money because they don't throw it away unprofitably. If you look like a winner, you'll get backed like one. To demonstrate you're a winner, get a lot of customers.

I'd add a few more points. Most likely, you're not a paragon of infinite ability. To build a company, you need to acquire talent that complements your own. You don't need to do this from the absolute beginning, but eventually, you need to scale the organization from just being you. This is often a hard, expensive and painful transition.

Oddly enough, it seems that if you already recognize your own limitations, you're probably not an entrepreneur.

If you think you've got what it takes to start your own business, just remember these points. The rest is left as an excerise to the reader.

Of late, I've had to think about mechanisms to protect web forms from getting spammed. For reasons that aren't very clear to me, spammers are writting bots to randomly fill in forms and submit them, as if that will really boost sales of the advertised (and often misspelled) product.

I apologize in advance for the scattered and disorganized state of this entry. I wanted to say something about what I've been working on.

You can look at a working version of the solution described below here.

One solution I've see comes from Blogger, which can require users to type in the letters that appear in a image. The letters in the image are distorted and there is often some background noise. This is to throw off optical character recognition routines that spammers might imploy to figure out what letters appear in the image. The distortions and noise thwart most OCR attempts.

I like this approach, but since I'm not very good with image manipulation, I needed another way to do something similar. The answer came from some reading I did years ago when I wanted to make video games for a living. In particular, I recalled that console fonts stored in PC ROM where typical composed of 8x8 matrixes. I then thought that if I could recreate these matrixes, I could represent these patterns as alternating colors in an HTML table.

Of course, it wouldn't be especially hard to create routines that read in thees tables of characters and produce the original character, but that's a refinement for another day.

Once I could translate characters into an HTML table, it was an easy thing to create a random series of characters to feed to this routine. To prevent simple packet sniffing of the secret word, I needed a way to pass something back to the client that could be used to verify the word. Since sending the password in clear text was obviously a non-started, I needed some kind of hash. The most natural hashing algorithm to use for what amounts to passwords is DES, which has been used by UNIX systems to protect their authentication system for years (although it's not really as unbreakable as PKI schemes).

The next problem was to create a mechanism where an HTML page could request this bundle of HTML tables that represent a word. This is where the oft-talked about Ajax techniques come into play. Ajax is simple an asynchronous RPC mechanism that's built with javascript and some other server-side programming technology. It took me a good bit of time to work through the most common gotchas that prevent reliable transportation of the Ajax RPC messages. Popular browsers have different DOM parsers that treat large (> 4096 bytes) data differently.

There are two major problems with the approach described here. The first is that it would be easy to write an OCR routine to read the HTMLized font. The second problem is that anyone can bypass the security by creating there own DES hash of an arbritary string and passing that string in clear text to the ajax server.

Let me tackle the second problem first. To ensure that the hash-value recieved by the ajax server can be trusted, two methods can be used. The first is to rewrite the secret word checker to use a session-based system. The user would be passed a session ID from the server. The server would remember what secret phrase it sent to the user. The user sends back their guess in clear text. The validator retrieves the secret from a backing store and makes the check.

I don't much like this stateful solution, although I believe it is superior to the original implementation. If you've got an app that already has sessions, perhaps this is a natural fit.

Another solution to this problem is to use a Public Key Infrasture mechanism to encode the secret into a hexadecimal string. When the user returns this encoded secret along with the clear-text guess, the server decrypts the secret using a private key. If the encoded secret has been tampered with, the decryption will fail. I would recomend this solution as a refinement to the anti-spamming mechanism I've described.

The second and more difficult problem with my mechanism is that it would be trivial to write OCR for the HTML emitted. It's true that the spam bot would have to speak javascript to get to this data at all, since the HTML is injected into the static web page via innerHTML(). But I don't think that's sufficiently obscure enough to baffle spammers. What would be needed is some kind of "noise" in the HTML to making OCR difficult. Other than adding spacing, altering capitalization and adding weird HTML attributes, there's nothing that a solid HTML parser and a good coder couldn't get a round.

All of this has made me appreciate just how good the human brain is at finding meaning in chaos. Digital creations just aren't up to that task yet.

From The Atlantic, 2005:

«Peter and Margaret Rataczak, of Wichita, Kansas, were the first to die on June 29, 2005, in a new wave of suicide attacks launched against the United States in retaliation for the killing of Osama bin Laden that spring, and for the continuing presence of U.S. troops in Iraq. These attacks were every bit as well planned as those of 9/11 and, in typical al-Qaeda fashion, used low-technology means to achieve maximum public impact. What we know about the attacks' planning and execution comes in large part from tourists who provided photos and video from their travels. Without these images we might never have known that the Rataczaks' killers were non-Arab.»

Just because terrorism is in your area of expertise doesn't mean you get to make me feel bad about the President's stunningly inept adminstration. You're a bad man! Why do you hate our freedom?

Here's another boring programming note to myself. Please note that I had to break lines of code for formatting reasons. Please use this syntax as a guideline. Don't try to cut and paste it.

Ajax is all the rage now. To me, it's just web services done with Javascript and Javascript blows bigger chucks than Java (and we all know how I feel about that).

In playing with the simple code on Mozilla's site, I realized that the browser complicates using Ajax as a simple RPC mechanism. The reason?
Browsers are inherently multithreaded applications and so all the RPC Ajax calls must be asynchronous. That means that you can't directly port something like XML-RPC or SOAP (both of which are more or less synchronous) to Ajax. Browsers run javascript on events. When the Ajax response finally comes back to the browser, a callback function is needed to continue processing the response.

That's not so bad, but what if you really want to do this:

<script> var uid = ↵ RPCRequest('server.php?action=getUID?username=jjohn'); </script>

The problem is that RPCRequest returns as soon as the request is made, not when the response comes back.

Here's the typical Ajax code (via the Mozilla article) that makes the request and parses the response:

// file: ajax.js // make the request, register the callback function makeRequest(url, cb) { var http_request = false; if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // Mozilla, Safari, ⦠http_request = new XMLHttpRequest(); if (http_request.overrideMimeType) { http_request.overrideMimeType('text/xml'); } } else if (window.ActiveXObject) { // IE try { http_request = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); } catch (e) { } } if (!http_request) { alert("No HTTP object!"); return false; } http_request.onreadystatechange = function() { alertContents(http_request, cb); }; http_request.open("GET", url, true); http_request.send(null); return http_request; } // the callback to handle the response from the server function alertContents(http_request, cb) { try { if (http_request.readyState == 4) { if (http_request.status == 200) { // parse out response var resp = http_request.responseXML; var val = ↵ resp.getElementsByTagName("response"). ↵ item(0).firstChild.data; cb(val); } else { alert('There was a problem with the request.'); } } } catch (e) { alert("Exception: " + e.message); } }

In this code, I expect a rather meager XML response that has only a response tag.

I got the notion that what I should do with the response handler is send it a callback from the caller to handle the parsed response. Something like the following:

<!â file: test.html â> <html> <head> <script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" src="ajax.js"> </head> <body> <span style="cursor: pointer; text-decoration: underline">Make a request</span> </body> </html>

Again, this works fine when the anonymous function has a globablly defined function like alert(). But what if you want to define a function in the caller's HTML page and have it called from code in the ajax.js page? I haven't figured that out yet (but see below).

The problem is that the scope of functions defined on the calling page is not visible (it seems) to the functions in the ajax.js page. I think I could get around this using fully-qualified DOM names ore something nutty like that.

I want to use objects, but of course, Javascript has classless objects which don't help here.
I guess I could define the callback behavior for each call, but that seems dumb.

I need to sleep on this a bit.

UPDATE: What a difference eight hours of sleep makes!

After digging around the javascript books I have, I came up with this more object-oriented version of the ajax code that removes the callback function in favor of a user-overridden method. That nicely divides that generic RPC tasks from the caller-specific ones. The code appears to run in both Firefox and Internet Explorer on my XP box, but I'm sure it will break in Opera and Safari.

Let's look at the new ajax.js file. This defines an "class" call RPCClient.

/* Much of this is from * http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX:Getting_Started */ function makeRPCRequest(url) { if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // Mozilla, Safari, ⦠this.http_request = new XMLHttpRequest(); if (this.http_request.overrideMimeType) { this.http_request.overrideMimeType('text/xml'); } } else if (window.ActiveXObject) { // IE try { this.http_request = ↵ new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); } catch (e) { this.errstr = e.message; } } if (!this.http_request) { alert("No HTTP object!"); return false; } // Can't use 'this' in callback. // Gets confuses with http_request. var thisObj = this; this.http_request.onreadystatechange = function() { thisObj.watchResponse(); }; this.http_request.open("GET", url, true); this.http_request.send(null); } function parseRPCResponse() { try { if (this.http_request.readyState == 4) { if (this.http_request.status == 200) { // parse out response var resp = this.http_request.responseXML; var val = ↵ resp.getElementsByTagName("response") ↵ .item(0).firstChild.data; this.handler(val); } else { alert('There was a problem with the request.'); } } } catch (e) { alert("Exception: " + e.message); } } // define the RPCClient object function RPCClient () { this.errstr = false; this.http_request = false; } // navigator 3 bug workaround for prototype new RPCClient(); RPCClient.prototype.send = makeRPCRequest; RPCClient.prototype.watchResponse = parseRPCResponse; RPCClient.prototype.handler = function (x) ↵ { alert("Default handler.n" + x) };

The idea of this code is that the user overrides the handler method to do something useful with the value that comes back from server.

Most of this code just replaces procedural elements with OO mechanisms.
However, notice this stupid looking assignment:

var thisObj = this;

I had to do this because of scoping behavior that, as a Perl coder, I find nutty and wrong. The trouble comes when I want to use the current object in the http_request callback/method onreadystatechange. Like most method declarations, I use an anonymous function to override the default action. When I try to use the this in the callback/method, it then refers to http_request object, not the RPCClient object.

Ugh.

I guess JavaScript has to work this way, since it doesn't have proper namespaces or Perl closure rules. How can I tell JavaScript which object this refers to? The answer is not to use this, but a reference to the current RPCClient object.

This is a pretty subtle point and it's easy to get forget. Of course, if you only use JavaScript, it probably makes perfect sense to you.

Time for the calling HTML page.

<!â file: test.html â> <html><head> <script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript1.2" src="ajax.js"></script> <style type="text/css"> .fakeURL { text-decoration: underline; cursor: pointer;} </style> <script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript1.2"> var rpc = new RPCClient(); rpc.handler = function(x) { alert("From the caller: " + x)}; function dump (obj) { document.write("<div><p><b>Object properties</b></p><dl>n"); for (var p in rpc) { document.write("<dt>property: <code>" + p + "</code></dt>" + "<dd>type: <code>" + typeof(rpc[p]) + "</code></dd>n"); } document.write("</dl></div>n"); } </script> </head> <body> <script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript1.2"> //dump(rpc); </script> <span class="fakeURL">Make a request</span> </body> </html>

There's a bit of debugging code in there that dumps the properties of the RPCClient object. I left that code here for future debugging needs. A new RPCClient object is instantiated as you'd expect. The default handler is overridden with a trival method.

Now the RPC mechanism looks a little cleaner! It's still asynchronous, but all the caller side code can be stored with the caller.

For the record, here's the PHP server, which is just echoes the values passed to it:

<?php header("Content-Type: application/xml"); header("Cache-Control: no-cache"); print "<?xml version='1.0'?>"; ?> <response> <? foreach($_GET as $k => $v) { print "$k => $vn"; } ?> </response>

This PHP is pretty trivial, but there are a few gotchas.

You have to set the MIME type correctly and disable browser caching.

You also have to emit XML, which is no big thing, except that the XML declaration looks like PHP code to PHP, so I had to be a little crafty in emitting it.

Finally, I just echo the key-value pairs I receive. Simple!

The next iteration of the code will pass the response back as a base64 encoded string. I don't need to pass complex data to the browser, but I may want to pass HTML. From my years of XML-RPC hacking, the best way to do this is by encoding the HTML. Otherwise, you'll go mad.

Have I mentioned that XML sucks too? It does.

Happy hackin'.

Here's an unusually thoughtful essay on the global war on terror.

«President Bush may reduce all of this to the terrorists looking for an "excuse," but al Qaeda and the jihadist movement grew out of a complex and convoluted anti-western, dare we say anti-Christian and anti-Jewish, narrative that began with the defeat of Soviet empire in Afghanistan and now promises the defeat of America, Israel, and the west.

The growth of dissatisfaction and terror, the summary of the National Estimate argues, is not only about Iraq: Corruption, repression, and inner battles within Islam and Muslim states are the sources of the spread and growth of today's jihadist movement.»

Most world powers have always persuded a rather brutal foreign policy. The U.S. isn't an exception and will be far from the last country to do this.
The Jihadis will not be defeated by force of arms, but by demonostrating to the world that their solution to mid-eastern problems is wrong-headed. Neither party in the U.S. is addressing this correctly and so: eternal war.

Do I really need to comment on this? Yes, yes I do.

Rhythmless white guys rapping is a joke so old, I remember when it was new.

Mulletboy is sad.

Noted sci-fi author Robert Heinlein once posited that humor in based in pain. Over the years, I've come to agree with him.

It's not that the kid in the video above is any dorkier than anyone else I know. He's not. I laugh because I have been that hysterical about things that turned out to be OK if I had just let the experience happen and not tried to fight it.

If that video isn't enough for you, how about other child abuse?

I know, I know. You're all going to kick yourselves to learn that you missed this year's Municipal Truck Faire in Burlington, MA this year. It happened last Sunday. It took place in downtown Burlington. There were lots of kids climbing into dump trucks, fire trucks, front-loaders, ambulances and whatnot.

In other news, there is a downtown Burlington. Also, truck faires happen in Blue States.

Stay tuned to this channel for more Tales to Astound!

Mary, Joseph and the Spook!

If I never see another goddamn inconsistent filesystem on a linux box, it will be way too soon.

Jeez-suhsâ¦

The more I use Java, the more I realize what "ivory tower development" means. And I don't like one bit, sir.

Java doesn't support printf. The C function printf is something nearly 100% of all programmers worldwide know how to use because it's how you make words appear on a screen or in a file. More importantly, it's the function you use to format text. That is, it allows you to control how many decimal places appear for floating point numbers, whether leading zeros appear in front of numbers, whether to show numbers as hexadecimal, octal or decimal, and a whole lot more. It's used in that most famous of introductory programs, hello.c:

#include void main (char **argv, int argc) { printf("Hello, world!n"); }

It's so basic a function that you can forget how darn useful it is.
But, Java doesn't have it. What Java has a method, which is part of those kinds of classes that concern themselves with streams, which is a highly generic way of thinking about files and consoles and network sockets and your mom.

Ok, let's leave your mom out of this (for now).

That Java method is named println. It doesn't know how to format your output (to make your decimal numbers all pretty or to add fancy columns to your output), but it does know how to put the platform-appropriate newline character on the end of your string! So, you've got that going for you!

Now, the designers of Java aren't stupid (more on this later). There are problems that programs using printf encounter. For instance, internationalizing the output of programs with printf can be difficult. Sometimes. In badly designed large programs, which few programmers ever have to deal with.

More damningly, printf is ideologically impure. It's a function and Java's all about the Objects, baby. Sure, they could have made a static method of the String (or OutputStream or whatever) class called printf, but that might cause someone a little grief sometime somehow. Better to cheese off every programmer coming to the language. Yup. Great thinking there.

Another noticable absentee from Java fopen. The C function fopen is known by 99% of all programmers worldwide and nearly all popular programming languages have something like open (Perl has 3 closely related file open functions but you probably only ever need open).

As programming interfaces go, fopen is pretty nasty. You need to pass it a filename (and all operating systems name files differently). You need pass it a mode (are you reading from, writing to, appending to the file or all of the above?).
And what do you get back from fopen? A file handle? A file descriptor? A lottary number? Who knows? However, it's a big puddle of programming poo that 99% of us have learned to deal with.

Instead, java has many circumlocutions to address files and even more to get data into and out of them. Working with files is task performed in 98% of all programs ever written. And Java makes getting to these files weird, frightening and confusing. You need a File object, which is then passed to a Output/Input Stream object, which in turn is passed to a Buffered Stream object. Nice and Object Oriented. And a complete pain in the genitals.

So, let's recap. Java, which was loosed upon the world in the nineties purposefully ignored very popular input/output conventions so that 100% of the programmers who learned any other language (most have syntaxes derived from C) would be utterly baffled by the most common of all programming tasks.

Are there times where all this OO sugar pays off? Sure. And Java is very helpful in these cases. Could Java have provided a nice compatibility layer for the oceans of existing C-based programmers? Sure, it could have.
Easily, in fact. But the Java language designers thought they knew more about the how to tackle the jobs that Java programmers would face than the programmers themselves.

In classical literture, this type of overweaning pride is called hubris. In my native country Massholia, we just call that "being a f*cktard."

Once again, it's Patriot Day. And like all holidays, this one has its own greeting cards. I confess, I haven't gotten my girlfriend a Patriot Day present yet, but I do have my topiary Twin Towers white spurce decorated with fake-flaming tinsel and toy airplanes. How my little nieces and nephews love to see the mechanical fireman race towards the bottom of the tree while the media train circles the perimeter!

Must we celebrate all our colossal intelligent failures with named holidays and greeting cards? If so, I haven't yet received my Pearl Harbor Day card, nor my August 24th White-House-Burned-by-the-British-in-1812 card either. Perhaps this is due to the high volume of Columbine/Waco/Murrah Building Day mail.

I'll be in my bunker if you need me.

UPDATE: In less jaded rememberance, I give you Sally's blog. Since she was in NYC during the attack, her thoughts are a bit more compelling on this topic than mine.

In the realms of politics, computer engineering and cooking, so much effort is spent trying to find the perfect solution for a problem or to determine an ideal candidate for a task. Sometimes, you just have to pick the best of the choices available to you and move on with your life. It's so seductive to lavish attention on trivial details in the face of a large, seemingly insurmountable problem.

I may return to this topic later, since I have many examples from Java where good enough solutions were heinously over-engineered into unworkable messes in the pursuit of perfect. SOAP is my favorite whipping boy for a protocol done wrong by over-wrought planning. Right now, I'm preparing for the weekend.

Happy Labor-daybor.

Here's a quick note to me on how to create a CGI script that streams a process to the browser in such a way as to prompt the user for a "save as" box. This is technique is older than dirt, but still useful.

#!/usr/bin/perl â use strict; use CGI; use POSIX q[strftime]; my $q = CGI->new; if (open my $in, "/usr/bin/zip -r - logs/ |") { my $filename="lhp_logs-".strftime("%Y%m%d", localtime()) . ".zip"; print $q->header({ "-type"=>"application/x-unknown", "-Content-Disposition" => "attachment; filename=$filename", } ); my $buf =""; while (read($in, $buf, 4048)) { print $buf; } } else { die "Oops: $!"; }

The error checking isn't particularly robust here. Please gold-plate this code as needed for your next review.

For the love of Job, people!
The Onion is not to be used as a source of product ideas. This just in from NW Florida Daily News:

«But computers are now invading the bathroom. For several years, manufacturers have been quietly pushing toilets and toilet seats costing $1,000 or more that use small, built-in computers and remote controls to add new features that warm, wash and dry you. As bathrooms become more upscale and luxurious, a digital toilet fits right in.»

Ladies and gentleman, we have an e-toilet now.

Compare with this vintage The Onion article from the height of the DotCom era:

«"Of course, rudimentary pee-commerce has been around almost as long as the Internet itself," Scoscia said, "but our new e-toilet will bring the Internet into the next millennium with real-time point, click and shit capability." Scoscia noted that "Number 2.0," as Silicon Valley insiders have dubbed it, will be cross-platform compatible and fully 2K Flushes compliant. In addition, he said, it will feature significantly wider, more comfortable bandwidth to accommodate even the most massive user download. »

Attention American innovators: before moving ahead with your product plans, take a moment to remove your head from your buttocks to make sure your idea isn't, well, asisine. And the same goes for politicians.

Thank you.

As I write this, I'm drinking a beer. Not just an ordinary beer, I've got a Blue Moon wit beer. 10 minutes ago, I was asleep in my girlfriend's bed, dreaming without care. Then, at 2 minutes past 5PM, Sally awoke me. She was obviously agitated.

"Joe! Wake up! There's a chicken in the front yard!"

It took me a moment to evaluate that chilling statment, but I composed myself well enough to investigate with Sally. We hurried downstairs to meet our destiny.

Sally lives in North Cambridge, an area not reknown for its chicken population. Still, one bad apple was all that it would take to plummet the real estate prices. A few other neighbors had been roused into action by the rogue rooster. Together, the five of us, armed only with a towel, nerves of steel and talent on loan from God, approached the last known whereabouts of the bird: Sally's backyard.

Most of my readers will never have a face down a full-grown rooster, whose engorged cockscomb bristles with beastly rage. And I pray that you never have to. On a good day, men loose their eyes to the firey tempers of these frenetic birds of prey. Who hasn't heard of the illegal cock fights of Mexico and been fascinated by the lurid pleasure that such a spectacle promises? The beast that we were staring down was of that ilk. One look in its cold eye told me: this was a foul pushed to the breaking point.

The neighbor with the towel volunteered to capture the rooster. She had had all of her animal shots and wasn't afraid of feathered death. The rest of us offered her encouragement from behind the wired fence.

She entered the yard with steely determination, but she needed direction. Roosters are masters of camouflage, but I fixed my eye on it. He had settled down into the mottled shade of low-growing weeds â a typical rooster ploy. The towel-wielder approached her target, but the bird was too crafty!
He skitted away towards the front of the house.

Quickly, Sally sprang to the front from the other side of the house to block his escape. But again, the rooster was too crafty to be trapped that easily. It doubled back, sneaking past us into another shadow-filled nook of the backyard. Again, we cornered the beast but before we could lay hands on it, the rooster squeezed through the fence and fled under a parked car!

I knew I had to act. I refused to let this, my adopted neighborhood, be held hostage to one bully cock. I grabbed a shovel and knelt on the ground beside the car and began to poke around in an effort to flush out the beast.

I knew that I had put myself right where the rooster wanted me: at eye level on his turf. I was looking death squarely in the eye, but who wants to live forever?

I thrust and shuffled, but still the bird didn't move. I stepped back and took another quick recon beneath the car. The rooster had holed up behind the front right tire. Clever. But, not clever enough.

Steeling myself, I aimed the shovel carefully and with one final shove, I had finally spooked the rooster from his spot! In this game of chicken, the rooster had blinked. But the hunt wasn't over yet. He was on the move and he wanted revenge.

I had lost sight of the bird for a moment. I assumed that the towel-wielder would catch him. My blood ran cold as I heard my team say: "Oh my God! It's right behind you!" Indeed, I turned to see the gaping maw of our quarry barreling directly towards my left foot.

But the rooster had overplayed his hand. By trying to get me, he had exposed his flank â a fatal mistake of tactics. Without warning, the rooster found himself rapidly enfolded in a towel and summarily shoved into a chicken-proof wire cage. The crisis was over.

In the continuing struggle of survival, humans had once again emerged on top. For now.

Some imaging-manipulating fool put this app together so that we can all be Steve Colbert.

I hate to say it, but stuff like this heralds the imminent fall from grace known as "jumping the shark" for this fine satire. Of course, that can only mean more Strangers with Candy.

«That's why the students here call me "The Hammer."»

I just fixed a bug that prevented all blog entries of a given tag to appear. For instance, computers has about 25 articles, but only the last 10 appears. Stupid SQL limit constraints.

It's fixed now, so I declare the terror alert level at taskboy to be lowered to papaya whip.

I spent this glorious summer day remaking an old song that I love called Round the Bend. This version captures the bouncy feeling better than the hasty demo I made years ago. This version is electrified for your protection with my telecaster.

UPDATE: I remastered a few older tracks, which you might find interesting. I swapped out some old, clunky synth patches for new, clunky synth patches.

• Strings
• Coming Down (much improved)
• Germs
• Spooky

From the Washington Post comes this sentence, which an exposition of interruption:

«The current room, built over Franklin Roosevelt's swimming pool â which is still there â dates back to 1970, and over the years has been the scene of daily combat between press secretaries and reporters.»

I would not have wanted to have been the copy editor for that piece.
Note the double dashes, which are standing in for our old friend the em dash (—). This is probably due to the difficulty of typesetting on the web. Having working in a publishing environment, it is difficult to correctly typeset word processor docs to HTML. The problem isn't actually technical, but human. It's hard enough to get authors to produce anything, let alone correctly marked up manuscripts. The double dash is probably a hold over from the days of typewritters. Still, a small perl script could convert the double dash into an em dash easily enough.

On the matter of content, I don't think this is a bad sentence. However, it might be a bit challenging for the average consumer of news prose. If asked, I would have suggested breaking the sentence in two, like this:

Dating back to the 1970s, the current room is built over Franklin Roosevelt's swimming pool, which is still there. Over the years, the room has been the scene of daily combat between press secretaries and reporters.

Note the perilous use of "1970s." Besides the hideous fashion memories invoked by the mention of this era, grammarians just can't agree on how to properly spell numerical decades (or plural numbers, in general). Depending on the editorial traditional, you will see "1970s" or "1970's." I think you've just got a pick which version you prefer and prepare to be berated for your poor choice. It's a lose-lose situation.

I can't fully express to how much more delightful quibbling over grammar is to writing Java code. My non-technical friends will just have to trust me.

A project for work required me to program in that most rigid and litigious of languages, Java. I used Apache Axis to make SOAP calls over SSL, thus making the project buzzword compliant. This post is about how, with the help of John Cho at VMware, I was able to coax Java in talking with SSL hosts whose X509 certificates have no recognized identity by the client. Typically, this means the hosts are self-signed and are not know to trusted root certificate servers. Without this hack, Java will refuse to use the SSL connection until the user imported the client certificate from the self-signed server, using the keytool utility from the JRE.

NOTE: Disabling authenticating of SSL certs is not compatible with security-sensative projects. Please understand that by using this hack, you are reducing the effectiveness of SSL security (although the actual network traffic through the SSL tunnel is still encrypted). The decision to use this hack is typical of the design choices made on the security-versus-convenience axis.

Although this code is specific to Axis, the careful reader may find this code applicable to their next Java project.

Apache Axis 1.4 (and earlier) uses the standard java.net.ssl package that is distributed with Sun's JDK 1.5 (it's in older JDKs too). The Axis class that creates the SSL socket factory that contacts the class that actually does the cert authenication is:

org.apache.axis.components.net.JSSESocketFactory.java

What we need to do create a special X509TrustManager that accepts all certs and install it as part of the SSL Factory. There's a lot of abstraction and action at a distance code here, so let's start with how to implement an all-trusting X509Certificate class.

class TrustyTrustManager implements javax.net.ssl.X509TrustManager { public java.security.cert.X509Certificate[] getAcceptedIssuers() { return null; } public void checkClientTrusted( java.security.cert.X509Certificate[] c, String authType) throws CertificateException { // do nothing, accept by default } public void checkServerTrusted( java.security.cert.X509Certificate[] c, String authType) throws CertificateException { // do nothing, accept by default } }

Recall that X509TrustManager is just an abstract class. It requires three methods to be implemented. Fortunately, these methods are easy to deal with, if you don't care about authenication. The first, getAcceptedIssuers(), is supposed to return an array of certs for trusted authority servers. Since we aren't going to consult any, we can return null there. The last two methods throw an exception if the described certificate cannot be authenticated by building a "trust path" from the root authorities to the given one. Since not throwing an exception means that the trust path was succesfully constructed, we do absolutely nothing in these methods. If only all code were so easy to write!

The only catch here is that we do need to import java.security.cert.CertificateException to handle the exceptions that we'll never throw, otherwise we get a compiler error. Thanks for the extra hoop, Java.

I added this class as an inner, private class to the JSSESocketFactory.java file, but you may want to isolate this code into its own file for use in other projects.

Now we need to install this X509Certificate class. This can be done by change the code in initFactory() to something like the following:

protected void initFactory() throws IOException { // Inspired by John Cho try { javax.net.ssl.TrustManager[] trusty = new javax.net.ssl.TrustManager[] { new TrustyTrustManager() }; javax.net.ssl.SSLContext sc = javax.net.ssl.SSLContext.getInstance("SSL"); sc.init(null, trusty, new java.security.SecureRandom()); sslFactory = (SSLSocketFactory) sc.getSocketFactory(); } catch (Exception e) { throw(new IOException("SSLFactory: " + e.getMessage())); } }

Let me step through the code backwards, since it will help to know where we're going with this method. The whole point of initFactory() is to initialize the protected class member sslFactory with a valid object. SSLSocketFactory objects are returned by javax.net.ssl.SSLContext objects, which the documentation describes like this:

«Instances of this class represent a secure socket protocol implementation which acts as a factory for secure socket factories. This class is initialized with an optional set of key and trust managers and source of secure random bytes.»

I emphasized "trust manager" here, since that's what we implemented with the TrustyTrustManager class. Now, we just need to create an SSLContext object for the SSL protocol (not sure why there are other options here), and shove in our TrustManager.

Well, not quite. It turns out that SSLContext expects to get an array of TrustManagers.

init(KeyManager[] km, TrustManager[] tm, SecureRandom random)

We don't need KeyManagers at all and the random seed can be generated from a method in java.security. What we do need is an array of TrustManagers with one TrustyTrustManager object in it. Once this is assembled, init() can be called correctly and the SSLSocketFactory obtained.

There you are! It's as simple as rocket science, but not as hard as brain surgery.

Some advanced Java coders will probably decry this code as cheating. It's not very OO to manhandle an existing class like this. Surely, there must be a way to subclass JSSESocketFactory and override the behavior of initFactory() more cleanly. The answer is "yes," but that means finding all those places that instantiate JSSESocketFactory objects and subclassing those classes. And, of course, you can see how this subclassing will quickly ripple through the entire object heirarchy of Axis to destroy all my free time. In Perl, I might have simply poked through the package namespace at some point to overwrite initFactory(). I'm not aware how to do that in Java effectively, but I welcome your suggestions.

UPDATE: For additional information on doing this with Apache's XML-RPC lib for Java, check this out. I think this technique may work with axis too, since it is built of the standard Sun SSL stuff. But, I haven't tried.

I have returned from a business trip to Palo Alto, California. It was my first sojourn to Silicon Valley. If ever I regretted not moving there during the boom, I do not now. It is difficult for me to explain my angst regarding the Sunshine state, but it has something to do with the way land is utilitized on the left coast. Buildings seem to be low and diffuse, as if someone spilled maple syrup over the land between the mountains and the ocean. I like tall things, like trees, hills and mountains. Large swaths of flat land unnerve me. Heavily populated arid regions irritate me. Too much sun makes me paranoid.

In short, I'm not really well suited for Californian living.

I need the varigated and verdant vistas of New England. I need seasons that try to kill me with heat and cold. I like not being able to see more than several dozen miles of my local geography at a time. I like the human scale of New England cities.

Of course, California has been selling beer in the grocery stores for much longer than those in Massachusetts. I blame the Puritans.

I may be out in Los Angeles later in the fall for the VMware World 2006 conference. Have I mentioned how much I enjoy long plane trips? No?
That's because I don't.

The quite excellent and disturbing blog Religious Freaks quietly notes the extremism, stupidity and general dunderheadedness engendered by taking old books a little too seriously. In particular, I point you to this delightful clip of FG's Peter explaining the opposing views of evolution versus creationism.
The careful viewer will note that neither explanation accurately reflects the nuances of these theories, but still: HA HA.

Sick of the driving and parking in Boston, many Red Sox fans charter buses when going to see home games at friendly Fenway Park. Usually, this is a sensible and mutually considerate strategy for both game attendees and Fenway residents alike. But tonight, one bus ride nearly ended in tragedy.

Instead of exiting the parking lot through the well-engineered exit, the bus pictured above decided to take a "short cut" between two buildings. The only problem? The alleyway exits onto Jersey Street via a very short but very steep incline of the sort that founders buses like turtles flipped on their backs.

These two buildings are directly across the street from my apartment building, so as I exited my home to run some errands, I became a witness to this vehicular crisis. Luckly me.

Some 30 or 40 people were milling around the area, attempting to hide from the pressing rays of the early evening sun. When I returned from my errands, a police car was blocking my street and a big tow truck had appeared on the scene to execute a complicated series of K-turns to position itself to do some good.

In the end, a simple pull from tow truck was all that was needed to get the bus over the hump.

Soon, the alleyway was bus-free and ready again for drunk people to urinate in.

But for some, the pain caused by this crisis continues. As the passenagers slowly reboarded the bus, a little sadder if not wiser for their travails, I couldn't help but reflect on the long-term effects of this tragedy. For instance, many will never get that 45 minutes of their lives back. I can only hope that most of them had Tivos to record the TV shows that they missed as a result of this delay. And what about those that passed the time engorging themselves with the garbage McDonald's sells? You can paint a directly line of arterial damage from their final, fatal heart attack years in the future to the Big Mac they had to eat today to survive.

When buses go off track, we all lose.

Last night, Sally and I saw Elvis Costello with Allen Toussaint at the Bank of America Pavilion (which was once called Haborlights). On this tour supporting his River in Reverse album, Elvis reworked many of his classics with a smoking New Orlean's horn section. The 2 1/2 hour show (no opening act and two encores) opened with a thundering version of "What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding." Elvis played several of his standards throughout the evening, including "Chelsea," "Watching the Detectives," "Pump it up," "Poison Rose," "Clubland," and "Alison" â which was particularly noteworth as it was arranged for horns. However, the real fun was had when Toussaint played his classic bluesy rock.

Really, this was one of the better shows I've seen. Almost no pretention and nearly all performance. The light show was minimal and there were no stage theatrics. Elvis did take a few (well deserved) swipes at President Dubya, but that was OK with most of the crowd.

You can read the Boston Globe's review or listen to a brief interview with Elvis. I definitely need to pick up his new album.

One member of the crowd who nearly stole the spotlight from the main stage was a bald gentleman in a white T-shirt that bore lettering colored like the American Flag. He was very highly animated at the start of the show, intensely thrusting his fingers in a peace sign at the stage in a "throwing the goat" sort of way.
Most of the time, these gestures were entirely inappropriate for the mellow songs of the evening and people around us began to openly mock this attendee by thrusting peace symbols in unison.

Boston: a town of mockery and hate.

The people have spoken. When it comes to mouthing off on this site, you want to muscle in on my turf. In the interests of peace and understanding, I have creating a commenting system for taskboy.com.

Since this is my house, these are my rules:

• Not every blog entry will have comments enabled.
• Comments require my approval before getting published.
• You can make only one comment per blog entry every five minutes.
• You have a very restricted set of HTML that you can use.
• Comments are not formated automatically, so learn some HTML already.
• You cannot edit your comment once you submit it.

As we all learned from Peter Parker's Uncle Ben: with great power comes great responsibility. On taskboy, the power is now yours.

As some of you have seen, I've implemented a tagging system that links to Technorati . I did so after consultation with and guidance from Jason McIntosh.

I tagged some old blogs, and may have damaged those a bit. Please report broken pages to me when you notice them.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about tagging. It's a form of bottom-up catagorization and makes the type-A personality in me whince. However, I'm not about to implement a top-down ontology for a frigging blog, so tags it is.

I've created a few backend administration pages to help me with these new features. Unfortunately, you can't see them, because their password-protected. One of these pages is a web form that allows me to make new blogs. While I do really, really prefer emacs for composition, a web UI let's me bang out these trivial updates more easily and from any networked computer.

Let me know what you think. If requested, I'll make a page that allows you to browse entries by tag.

UPDATE: I tagged most of the old blog entries. I also created a new page called Tags (which can be found under Sections) that can be used to thread entries by tag. I stole, I mean, reused the CSS from del.icio.us to weight the tags by occurrences. I think that brings taskboy up to the cutting edge of 2003 blogging technology.

Infamous founder of and guitarist for Pink Floyd, Roger "Syd" Barrett has died at the age of 60.
Many will no doubt be surprised to learn he lived this long. I'm a fan of Floyd's early work with Syd, but I never followed his solo career, which was a bit too nutty even for me.

Many will have heard about Syd's penchant for psychedelic drugs, much of which fueled his music and stage shows. One report had him mixing in hallucinogenics with his hair gel so that as the stuff melted on stage, Syd would get all tripped out.

Sadly, the potent combination of success, drugs and youth proved ruinous in Barretts's case. After being removed from Floyd, Syd lived the rest of his days under supervision and reclusion.

Many rockers since than have aped much of Barretts insane style of fashion. His tempestous hair and dark, haunted eyes are a mainstay of brooding rock to this day.

So long, Syd. Thanks for music.

Check it out!

And I resent the implication that I had something to do with creating this flith with Sally.

This

map should help all of us understand the human cost this administration's

strategy for proscuting the War on Terror. It would be even better to have

a map of the deaths of Iraqis and Afghanis along side of this. What an

incredible waste of resources on both sides.

The Institute for Analytic Journalism

compiled this map. As I learned in my geographic class, maps can convey a

information in a powerful and concise way.

The world doesn't seem to have enough places for random web users to mouth off. Should I help easy this paucity or not?

Once again, I return to abusing that humble religious leaflet I found on the subway. Last time, I talked about the acceptable uses for semicolons. This time, you and I need to have a frank discussion about dashes. Here are two samples of dash disasters from There yet can be hope for you:

• But friend - it need not be so!

• Yes, He does - no matter how far down you've sunk in despair. God does care! And - God CAN help.

Before pulling apart these sentences, perhaps I should begin by sharing a rather recent revelation I had: there are several kinds of dashes, each of which has a specific grammatical function. If you didn't know about the speciation of dashes, I won't nail you to a tree. But enough about you. Let's talk more about me.

When I attended school on Cape Cod and Boylston, MA in the late Permian era, dashes were talked about in nervous and dismissive tones, in much the same way "foreign" places like New York City and L.A. were referrenced. The mercurial nature of dashes, marks which I erronously equated with hyphens, beguiles even the best of us at times. Only wizened typesetters know the entire breadth of dash-lore and they aren't talking.

However, I can confidently say that dashes are used properly in the following ways:

• to continue words onto another line;
• to interrupt the main idea of a sentence;
• and to make compound adjectives that avoid ambiguity.

That doesn't sound too tricky, right? The problem is that each kind of dash of varies only a tiny bit in length, but each has a specific use.

OK, let's meet the players.

Note that there are variants of the em dash and en dash which are longer that have pretty obscure usages, like indicating missing letters in a word, missing words in a manuscript or immitating Gothic short stories by Edgar Allen Poe, H. P. Lovecraft or Lord Dunsany.

Also note that only professional publications differentiate between dashes. For your high school and undergraduate English essays, don't get too worked up about this. You'll only freakify your teacher, who will want to change all your em dashes into two hyphens.

Now that we've had a small dose of grammatical viagra, let's have a look at the first example from the leaflet again. The dash here is used to indicate a small pause and perhaps to add emphasis to the independent clause. I can't think of a defense for using any kind of dash here when a comma so naturally fits. Dig it:

But friend, it need not be so!

The comma, so familiar that it becomes nearly invisible, reassures the reader that the author is no half-crazed Jesus-freak, but a thoughtful theologian in the spirit of Thomas Aquinas.

Whatever equanimity would be gained from such an edit would be quickly dispelled by the train wreck that is the second example, which follows:

Yes, He does - no matter how far down you've sunk in despair. God does care! And - God CAN help.

Once again, the first dash ought to be replaced, but with what? The Spirit strongly moves me to put a period after "does." Not only does that eliminate the off-putting dash, it makes a dramatic, punchy opener — which is, after all, the whole point of a dodgy religious leaflet.

Of course, ending the sentence on "does" creates an incomplete fragment of the rest of the sentence. Fortunately, what's left would make an excellent complement to this fragment and create a punchy follow up to the brutal opening. And all that needs be done is capitalize the n in "no" and change the period to a comma. Pappy like!

We're almost out of the woods now. This last sentence is a bit tricky. The safest edit to bring this little guy into compliance with mainstream American English is to simply eliminate the dash and be done with it. It's true that some prescriptivist donkeys will bray over starting a sentence with a conjunction, but this is simply the ululation of a dying breed. The bigger issue is one of music, which is far from an easy thing to standardize. The author clearly wants a dramatic pause before the punchy final clause. What to do?

If you refer to the table above, you'll note that the em dash can be used like a colon to introduce an explanation or summarizing clause. I think that given the needs of the music of the prose, an em dash is a justifiable choice here as the last clause seems like some kind of explanation to me. Surely, there are those that will disagree with this reading and choice. They should feel free to discourse prodigiously about their dissent elsewhere in the blogosphere.

Here are my edits to the second example:

Yes, He does. No matter how far down you've sunk in despair, God does care! And â God can help.

Next time, I'll move from grammatical kibitzing to prose jockeying as I tangle with mysterious words, uncomfortable informalities and the Last Temptation of Capitalization. I may even scan in the original leaflet.

Peace out, yo.

When searching for phrase that captures a particularly elusive concept, you could do a lot worse than turn to the Germans for help. In this case, I want to talk about Schadenfreude. Derived from two Middle High German words, Schadenfreude is a mash-up of Schaden, meaning "damage", and Freude, meaning "joy". It is a noun used to describe those vicious individuals that seem to feed off the tears of their enemies. It is a term that's been applied to me on a number of occasions, many of which were not entirely without merit.

However, Schadenfreude is an excellent term to describe the professional life of the late Ken Lay, who flat-out conned Enron employees and investors into a lie that he benefitted hansomely from.

When big business cheats the system as Lay's Enron does, it damages one of the most important building blocks upon which the U.S. was founded: joint-stock companies. Going into business is risky. Companies issue stock to spread the risk around. By taking advantage of investor trust, Lay and others of his ilk jeopardize America far more than Mid-Eastern extremists.

Which is why I would have stuck Lay on a meat hook in front of Wall St. as a reminder to all would-be white-collar crooks that massive theft will not be tolerated.

When my people come to power, there will be changesâ¦

SOAP::Lite is a suite of Perl modules for doing SOAP RPC. SOAP::Lite was originally written by mad Russians. Its incredible flexibility is also it's main drawback. Debugging isn't as obvious as it could be with this library.

Most of the time you the would-be SOAP scripter want to know what the request and response XML messages look like. The SOAP::Trace doc doesn't make this clear (since the sample code is filled with mistakes). Here is one way to get SOAP to spew the XML messages to STDOUT they way you'd expect from a more humble module like Frontier::Client.

use SOAP::Lite "trace" => ["transport" => \&log_it]; sub log_it { my ($in) = @_; if (ref $in && $in->can("content")) { printf "**GOT: %sn", (ref $in); print "-"x60, "n"; print $in->content, "n"; print "-"x60, "n"; } }

There's a lot of fun things going on in the log_it() subroutine.
Notice the use of the oft-forgotten can() method, which all Perl objects have. Yes, this is a very special code review.

Should SOAP::Lite have a simple flag like "trace_xml" which does all this for you? Sure it should. But until then, you've got this humble blog and your old Uncle jjohn to help you.

Now get the hell off my lawn, you kids!

This is the first in a series of musings about English punctuation and why it's so darn hard to get right.

While on the T, I came across a small leaflet proclaiming that "There yet can be Hope for You." Always looking for a dim ray of hope in an otherwise bleak existence, I continued to read what the Bible Baptist Church had to say.

As it turns out, they had a lot of interesting things to say (interesting in an In Search Of kind of way). Unfortunately, their inspirational message was marred by poor punctuation and magical phrases.

The first misstep comes from the rather misunderstood critter known as the semicolon. Here's how the leaflet uses a semicolon:

«There seems little use in caring any more; in trying anymore; in going on anymore;»

Semicolons have two primary uses: to connect closely related independent clauses and to denote items in a list of complex clauses. You'll note that these "rules" require editorial discretion and are far from being unambiguous. The The Chicago Manual of Style has 7 usage rules for semicolons, and a few of those cover when not to use semicolons.

Surely, the last semicolon of this fragment is indefensible. Semicolons never end a sentence. The other semicolons are used a list separators, which is one of the legitimate uses of this mark. However, the list elements are neither long nor complex, so if I were copyeditting this, I would change these to plain old commas. Here's a more standard looking version of the sentence:

«There seems little use in caring anymore, in trying anymore, in going on anymore.»

That's all the time I have for today. Next time, I'll explore why hyphens are not m-dashes.

One more from You Tube.

Dating is hard. Most people already know this. Men want one thing, women want another. So why not turn over the negotiations to trained professionals.

I assume these guys work on contingency.

UPDATE: Also see: Manny Coon

This techno video explains the futility of war to those of us weened on Space Invaders. Who knew the invaders had such a rich home life?

Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori.

It's been a remarkably busy week around Chez jjohn. I hope to catch my breath tomorrow.

In the meantime, I wanted to wish my mother a happy 71st birthday. She'll never see this post because she doesn't have a computer, nor know about this web site, nor really even know about the Internet (other than that's where pedaphiles and terrorists hang out). I didn't have time to get her real flowers, so these will have to do.

It's the thought that counts, right? Maybe not. I'll get her flowers for her next 71st birthday.

It was sunny in my dream last night. I was interviewing for a most unusual and prestigious job, the office of which was located in some alpine region. I recall taking a strange monorail-like train, which was both modern in engineering, but antique in design. The low office building stretch among a thick tree cover composed of evergreen and deciduous trees. The train track ran above and to the side of the building so that I got a bird's eye view of the place. It was white like plaster, but not quite as dusty. It lay like a great white snake among the trees.

I recall feeling neverous about the interview. Although I knew it was for an IT position that I was fully qualified for, the business was not strictly a tech company. Although I cannot remember exactly what they did, the company was involved in some kind of graphic design or something arty. I had some contacts within the organization, so I knew something about the place.

I was led through the long, narrow halls of the office, which though buried in trees, still recieved a lot of sunlight. The office was full of pretty, hip people who looked at me doubtifully. We meandered through the modern interior and climbed the stairs to a sort of isolated loft area.

My interviewer, who might have been Collin Mockery, began with some standard questions that I don't recall. However, I do know that my heart was racing. He then asked me what I thought of the office music, which was sort of a low-keyed version of Enya. I recall not being prepared for this kind of question. Neverously, I answered "I suppose I could get used to it in 4-6 weeks." This turned out to be a very bad answer.

I then got an image of the president of the company watching the interview thorough closed circuit TV on a large, wall mounted, white trimmed plasma screen monitor. The president was a forty-something, Silicon Valley-type of dotcom visionary, full of confidence, but short on practical business advice. At my answer, he doubled over with derisive laughter saying, "Wow! He did not just say that! He actually used the delivery cliche verbatum!"

With their leader in fits of laughter, the rest of the office sort of turned to my direction looking down their noses at me. The interviewer stopped the interview and said "sorry, I don't think you're a good fit here."
I then had to walk alone down to the lobby, which had a fireplace, to collect my things. Everyone seemed to be gloating over my failure. The one friendly face I saw was an old IT mentor from my UMass/Boston days, who apparently now worked there. He offered his condolences about the job, but told me not to let it get me down.

In real life, I woke up feeling badly used and depressed. It seemed that I had forever being trying to get in with the "cool kids" and failing. This dream was yet another manifestation of this unfulfilled feeling.
And then it occurred to me that this sadness was somewhat groundless.
Professionally speaking, I've had a fairly respectable career. And yet, I always feel I'm just on the verge of gaining respectability and acceptance.

I should mention I watch a couple hours of Aqua Teen Hunger Force before going to bed. Maybe that was the problem. Next to Carl, I feel like a superstar.

I acquired an old DL360 (PIII 1.4/1G RAM/36GB SCSI (2)) from eBay for relatively short money (under $650). I needed a machine to develop Leostream apps for ESX. I've installed 2.5.3 on it now. I'll probably put ESX 3 on it when the final version is in my hot little hands.

When it's on, it sounds like a small vaccuum cleaner. It's my first dual-proc machine in chez Johnston. This machine replaces the ESX 2.1 "cluster" I had cobbled together with PIII 500 machines.

Since ESX 3 is supposed to support NASes, I hope that I can use the open source FreeNAS project for my common VMFS storage. Of course, having common storage suggest buying another DL360. That may or may not be needed. We'll see.

In the meantime, new toys!

Today's health lesson involves nerves. When nerves in the spine get irratated through bad posture or bad ergonomics, they become irrascible devils. I learned this lesson twice this week.

Living the thrill-seeking life that I do, I carried several O'Reilly books across town yesterday in a less than salutory sachel. You can't stop me!
Don't even try! Next time, I might even wear shoes with poor arch support.
What are you gonna do about it? Nothing! I'm an EXTREME PEDESTRIAN! [Cue nu-metal guitar stab]

The result of my high adventure was a night spent oscillating between the floor, the tub and the bed trying to find a prone position that allowed my irratated nerves to stop screaming at me. Although the tylenol helped a bit, it was the last drought of Nightquil that put me down. By knocking me out, I stopped moving long enough for my nerves to get happy. I tried to use some relaxation techniques from yoga which did help, but I couldn't keep up the concentration long enough to remedy the problem. I'm no Mr. Spock.

Today, my back is somewhat less than perfect and the rumor of another outbreak looms. However, I've been able to take naps, so I'm not complaining.

What I love most about New England is that each season is distinct form the others. It's warm in the summers and cold the winters and gosh-darn it, I like it that way. However about this time of year, it's starts getting muggy and hot. Since my apartment doesn't have central air, I have to install a window air conditioner in my bed room. It's not a powerful unit, so it needs to stay on for days at a time to maintain the pleasant atmosphere.

Air conditioning is a double-edged sword, since it means that I'm sort of trapped in my bedroom until the cool, Canadian air returns. I've dubbed this auxiliary redoubt the Battle Bridge, after Star Trek because I'm giant nerd and because things need to have names lest we all fall into chaos and perdition.

Today marks the first operating day of the Battle Bridge this year.
I'll let you all know when the shuttle lands.

BTW, the graphic I snarfed above is from a very excellent resource of make-believe stuff called Ex Astris Scientia. Get your nerd on!

To the drunk young man who repeatedly asked me to dance on the rotating disco floor and who later incoherently slurred to me in the men's room later that evening, I hope that you made it home alive. I'm sorry if the black and white furry pimp hat gave you the wrong impression of me. In case you thought the world didn't care, one all male couple later asked me, "are you taking that boy home? He is drunk!"

To the "professional girl" and older "gentleman caller" who was "courting" her on the dance floor, I can only hope that your financial transaction was successfully concluded and profitable for both of you.

Finally, to the eighteen-year-old attractive blond who was shooting hoops until closing in the big-hair band bar and who inserted a breath mint into my mouth at the end of the evening, you clearly didn't understand what the pimp hat was trying to tell you about me and perhaps that was my fault. I should have tried to explain it to you instead of slurring incoherently. My bad.

From the reaching-the-level-of-the-room dept. comes this blog explaining why the NSA's prodigious and unwarranted wiretapping programm is both harmful to Americans and ineffective at stopping terrorism.

The explanation is mostly composed of common, one-syllable words.

«Q: What if the court takes too much time? We could die from bad-dark-man plots and bombs!!

A: The way the FISA court works, you don't have to go see them that day. You can start the wire tap first, then go see the FISA court in three days.

Q: Hmmm, but what if the court wants too much proof, and the NSA does not get its wire tap? We could die from bad-dark-man plots and bombs!!

A: It is not hard to get a "yes" from the FISA court. It is, in fact, no sweat, child's play, slight, smooth, a snap. It is the town bike of courts. It is the Paris Hilton of courts. Pet the dog, buy the third drink, and you are in. Through the end of the year 2004, the FISA court said "yes" to 18, 761 warrants. They said "no" to five. 5 is much, much, much less than 18,761.

Q: Hmmm. It is cinch to heed the law then, and still keep us safe. YAAYYY!»

I expect that this explanation will help even regular viewers of Fox News to understand the problem.

Ok, nap time everyone.

For those that do technical support professionally or otherwise, this article will seem strangely familiar:

«Help Vampires are found in every public online community, from those nearest to our hearts to those furthest from our principles.

Instead of consuming of ill-gotten hemoglobin, these vampires suck the very life and energy out of people. By nature they feed on generous individuals who tend towards helping others, and leave their victims exhausted, bitter and dispirited. »

Remember: telling the stupid and lazy that they are stupid and lazy rarely helps the problem (although that trick does work on me when I'm stupid and lazy).

Update: Also see this Strong Bad email.

Programmers love to argue about which programming languages are better than others. If you listen carefully, you'll notice that there's a hierarchy to the debate. Java programmers laugh at C++. C++ coders deride C monkeys. Everyone laughs at shell hackers. No one can understand assembly programmers and those that "think in LISP" occupy a sublime and knowing orbit above all rest (so they think).

But I'm a Perl hacker first and foremost. Despite some of the more vocal members of the community, Perl is a humble language (with, as its critics will quickly add, much to be humble about). In recent years, I've forced myself out of this comfort zone into the wider world of programming. Like all generalist, I try to pick the right tool for the task. For instance, PHP is a best tool I've found for general web applications, which is why this site uses it. For quick and dirty Windows games, Python (with its pygame library bindings to SDL) stands alone. For repetative system admin tasks, shell scripts and cron combine like Voltron to create superlative software robots. The thing is, most programming languages are pretty similar. They have data types, loops and conditional branching.
That's really the bare minimum you need to get things done. Where languages differ is in the services they offer the programmer.

I've heard that you love someone not for his winning attributes, but for his faults. However, I've found that there are definitely some faults that are harder to love than others. This missive is about those faults in Java that keep our relationship forever at the stage of the first date. If Java is your "Main Mama", you may want to stop reading this now.

For my work, I need to hack up a bit of Java that speaks XML-RPC. Now, you may recall that I'm no stranger to working with this protocol. I've written XML-RPC clients and servers in Python, Perl, PHP, ASP and even (God help me) C. But I missed out on Java until now.

No problem, I thought. I'll just look through my book at the chapter Simon St. Laurent wrote about using the helma XML-RPC library for Java. Simon did the lion's share of the book and did the most thorough job of any of us on the project, so I took a look. Funny thing: that library has morphed into the Apache XML-RPC library. Ok, fine.
How different could it be? I mean, it was working fine before. How many changes were needed? Perl's Frontier::RPC library has hardly changed in six years (and we use it heavily at Leostream).

As it turns out, the one thing Java does well is faciliate abstractions. With the newest version of the library, you can tweak all kinds of parameters, swap out XML parsers, add additional data types (which defeats the whole effing point of XML-RPC), create new class factories â the list goes on! In fact, there's a whole class just for configuring the XML-RPC client! Excessive you say? Just wait.

The one thing you can't do with this library is start using it quickly. The main culprit? Missing dependencies. When I tried to run a simple XML-RPC client, it complained about not knowning how to encode the XML-RPC timestamp thingie. Oy. But wait! Weren't JAR files
supposed to solve this issue? Wrong again, Fatty!

Ok, so I needed to install subversion just to get the bleeding-edge version of the missing ws-common library. That's not so bad, right? Wrong. I also needed to get a nightly snapshot of the TRUNK code of the main library because the "release" version could not handle structures correctly (the unknown "string" problem). Fine. That happens. It's open source so you've got to expect the release management to get a little "cowboy" sometimes.

At length, my "hello, world" XML-RPC program got up and running. After several phone calls gloating about this teapot triumph, I proceeded on to handling more realistic and complicated data structures. I had my test server return a structure to my Java client that had a value that was an array.
In perl, the structure looks something like this:

{ "foo" => "bar", "boz" => [ "boom", "doom", "soon" ], }

Here's a quick test: how many dictionary classes does Java have? I'm talking about generic collection types that hold key-value pairs. 1? 3? 10? Wrong!
It's a trick question. In Java, new Map classes spontaneously generate all the time.

I bring this up because in order to traverse this data structure, I need to know the how to type the objects correctly. Now, in simple programs where you control the data, that's easy. When you have to deal with arbitrary data coming in from an unknown source, Java whips out the hate on you.

Because Java sucks is very advanced, I have to iterate through methods to transverse this structure. Something like the following:

Map my_struct = get_the_struct(); Iterator it = struct.keySet().iterator(); while (it.hasNext()) { Object this_key = my_struct.next(); Object raw_object = result.get(this_key); // here comes the good part Class c = raw_object.getClass(); if (c.isArray()) { // fetching this object was so nice, I do it twice! Object [] this_value = (Object []) result.get(this_key); System.out.print(this_key + " => "); int i; for (i=0; i " + raw_object); } }

It took me about 3 hours to puzzle out this code. It would have been swell for the docs to have an example of handling complex data like arrays and hashes, but then I would have missed out on my afternoon of personal discovery and emotional growth.

After many fruitless web, book, and source code searches, I managed to hack this code to handle my "weird" data. It's crappy, but it works.

The truly loathesome part is the way I had to work with hash values that are arrays. For reasons that aren't clear, I couldn't just use the value returned from a Map if it is an array of Objects. That would be too easy. I had to properly cast the data because Java is a bucket full of venomous hate. Of course, I need to check if the object is, in fact, an array and then fetch the object again for the cast!

Allow me to paint with a very broad brush for a moment. The stunt programming exhibited in the code above is exactly the kind of stupidity that prevents Java folks from learning about what's going on in the rest of the computer universe. Strict data typing is 100%, no-foolin' legalese.

All modern scripting languages handle this kind of "collection of random data types" better than Java. VBScript is only slightly less lawyerly about it, but it too sucks hard on big, stiff data structures (VBScript has two assignment operators: one for objects, one for everything else. Thanks for nothing, Microsoft).

It's enough to really bring me down, man.

What the hell is wrong with these language designers? Can they please stop worrying about continuations, anonymous classes, multiple inheritance, abstract interfaces, factory classes and orthogonality long enough to make a language that's useful for the kind of problems I have to deal with? I live in world of strings. If your language makes dealing with strings hard for me, I will hate you with my fists.

Can I get a "hell ya!"?

Jesus H. Christ.

While I don't like to meta-blog, I do need to point out Sean Burke's particularly biting and accurate berating of this Spanish treatment of the U.S. national anthem. I thought Sean was being hyperbolic in his criticism, simply working up a good crank, but then I listened to the song.

«And then, because mere lyrics and melody are not painful enough, there is the actual performance [4MB mp3]. It is a horror worse than Lovecraft could have imagined, because even he could not have pictured a chorus of Cthulhus gospel-yodeling in the high tradition of Cèline Dion and/or American Idol.»

Worble on like french fry fatten finches, you masters of melody, you saints of salsa!

What a difference three years can make! Back then, we were in a pitched war to liberate Iraq from a cruel dictator (should I even mention WMD?).
Now, we're in a dirty, guerilla war in Iraq with over 2,000 dead American soliders and mounting global terrorism.

At some point, someone from the administration will have to remind me why we spend $300 billion on this. Frankly, I think we bought a lemon of a war. Maybe the upcoming Iran war will turn out much, much better.

Mission Accomplished!

(Reminder: regime change starts at home.)

For those seeking more evidence that culture in U.S.A. is in the last stages of decay, I present this story about a problem that doesn't exist in places that have real problems:

«Sarah Brecht started cutting herself when she was a teenager.

"The triggers were when I felt anger, sadness," Brecht said.

She felt she was alone with her compulsion to injure herself until she found a community of people just like her online. »

If we would just close down the Internets, all badness would go away!

I'm sitting on some big news. Maybe next week, I can talk about it.

Until then, celebrate the last 999 days of the W presidency with Sean Burke's 999 Names of George W. Bush. Muslims believe that Allah has 99 and to know them all brings enlightment/bliss. To know the 999 names of Bush is simply a way to win a bar bet.

Good thing there's an RSS feed!

UPDATE: Ok. I jumped the gun by a day or two. Sue me.

"Weird Al" Yankovic is the most misunderstood music critic in America. I think it's the "weird" in his name that throws people off. Maybe his addiction polka. Maybe it's the crinkle-curl hair. Whatever the cause, it's a shame because Al's Angry White Boy Polka succinctly details exactly what's ineffably awful about Nu-Metal.

As a genre, Nu-Metal was born in the dying embers of both Grunge rock and "Big Hair" rock (clearly a May-December relationship if there ever was one). A good Nu-Metal band is Helmet (although I'm not a fan, I can tell those guys can rock). The rot set in when Nu-Metal became a corporate commodity and stupid white boys thought that they could rap over wailing distorted guitars.
I'm not sure that's how Affirmative Action is supposed to work.

From the mid-nineties on, the Suck knob on Nu-Metal continued to get cranked higher and higher until, well, even Weird Al noticed. In 2004's Poodle Hat, Yankovic went back to his roots with "Angry White Boy Polka." Unlike the polka tune on his first album which seemed to celebrate "classic rock," I get the feeling Al is making a point of showing off the cyclopean banality of the lyrics that populate the most commercially successful examples of Nu-Metal. "Preachy" doesn't really seem to cover for these whiny punks, but judge for yourself. After listening to a few of these tunes, I get the feeling that covering Pat Benatar's "Love is a Battlefield" in this style would be a mega-hit.

I have created a table that lists the source material used in Weird Al's parody. Old folks like me will certainly have avoided most of these excremental twits, but now, no matter your age, you can confidently say, "Staind?
Those Nu-Metal guys suck!"

Nu-Metal: a musical STD of nineties.

Band		Song		Album		Sample
PAPA ROACH	Last Resort	INFESTED		Sample
SYSTEM OF A DOWN	Chop Suey	TOXICITY		Sample
THE VINES	Get Free	HIGHLY EVOLVED		Sample
THE HIVES	Hate to say I told you so	VENI VIDI VICIOUS		Sample
WHITE STRIPES	Fell in Love with A Girl	WHITE BLOOD CELLS		Sample
THE STROKES	Last Night	IS THIS IT?		Sample
DISTURBED	Down with the sickness	THE SICKNESS		Sample
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE	Renegades of Funk	RENEGADES		Sample
LIMP BIZKIT	My Way	CHOCOLATE STARFISH AND THE HOT DOG FLAVORED WATER		Sample
STAIND	Outside	BREAK THE CYCLE		Sample
KID ROCK	Bawitdaba	DEVIL WITHOUT A CAUSE		Sample
P.O.D	Youth of the Nation	SATELLITE		Sample
EMINEM	The Real Slim Shady	THE MARSHALL MATHERS LP		Sample

Today's installment of Ask an Internet Foggy concerns the standard Windows background color. For the modern versions of Windows, the RGB values are, in uncool decimal:

red: 58 green: 110 blue: 165

It used to be dark cyan but then it switched to a more professional shade of blue.

Yes, I'm blogging this because I expect to look this up later in my life.

It's funny how you can know a guy for twenty years and still discover something new about him. Don't worry â this isn't the start of Brokeback Mountain II.

I've known Zorknapp for nearly twenty years. I've lived with him (platonically) twice. We've been in a band together.
We do a radio show together. And yet, there are aspects of my friend that have remained hidden from me for years.

Mike doesn't like nuts (drupes, legumes, seeds, etc. [but he's fine with crazies]).

Now everyone has his own preferences when it comes to food. There's no commandment that we should all like the same things. Variety is the spice of life and whatnot. As a class of food, I don't care for fruit very much (I'm looking at you, raspberries). But Mike really doesn't like nuts. His dislike exceeds merely not wanting to eat them. Ideally, Mike would like a government pogrom to round up and exterminate these much-beloved snack foods.

Mike is quite vocal on this subject. His normally equanimous disposition on most things evaporates when the topic of nuts manifests.
He loathes peanut butter; disdains pistachios; ahbors almonds; scorns cashews; rejects chestnuts. The smell of nuts drives all reason from the man. In the struggle against them, there can be no comprise, no quarter. To Mike, the feotid smell of open graves is less offensive than the smallest Reeses Peanut Butter Cup. His ill-will for these tiny nuggets of protein is palpable and oppressive.

In short, he is a nut racist.

I have little doubt that he will someday produce a pamphlet promulgating his nutty jihad to a population of emotional dead but physically violent youths who, because they were raised on Mickey's Big Mouths and stale pretzels, won't know the joy of perfectly salted peanuts. Blinded by their irrational prejudice, the Nut Haters will clash with the Nut Lovers in a conflict that will paint the streets red with blood. Then all that will be left will be cochroaches, who will show no preference between feasting on legumes or on the human corpses of a Nutpocalyptic war.

I hope to God I don't live to see that day.

Sisyphus had his stone. Tantalus had his fruit. My tormentor is opening day at Fenway park. This is the start of my tenth year of suffering through a day filled with loud tourists, street vendors, panhandlers, scammers, Caroline and the occasional flyover by a U.S. fighter jet. I will be in a client office tomorrow for most of the day, but this sort of thing doesn't blow over in a few hours.

Good thing I've got beer in the fridge.

I'm so jazzed about my new monitor!

It's been a long time since I've raved about any computer equipment, mainly because I've been buying cheap crap from newegg.com. While that stuff is functional, it's not going to challenge Apple for any design awards.

To deal with some increasingly painful back aches (that I believe are all posture related), I decided to invested in a quality LCD monitor for my bedroom/office. For those keeping track, this is my second LCD monitor for my bedroom. The original 14" model is still in use for my music workstation.

My first choice for a monitor was the unbelievably awesome Apple Cinema display. Starting at $800, these devices are a luxury item that will have to wait until I make my tech start-up millions. Instead, I spent less than half of that (thanks to the aforementioned newegg) on an HP 1955 19" LCD monitor.
At 24 pounds, it's a solid piece of equipment that reminds me of HP's glory days of manufacturing industrial-strength PC equipment.

Although I could have spent around $250 for a similar monitor, I wanted a display that would very likely work with a Mac Mini, which I think I will buy sometime this year. I can then get a KVM switch to go back and forth between the laptop and the Mac. I reasoned that Apple was more likely to support HP and some nutty Pacific Rim manufacturer. I'll let you know if this gambit pays off.

In any case, spending dough on a monitor makes more sense to me that spending cash on a computer. My monitors typically outlast the hosts. Since monitors are a huge part of the computer experience, it seems reasonable to put some loot out for a good one.

As far as I can tell, there are no dead pixels on this screen and the picture is very sharp and bright. Because the screen sits at eye level, I won't be hunched over looking, scanning for items on the desktop â like a God-damned monkey! I've got opposable thumbs and the will to use them!

I'll run through the short list of problems. None of them are show-stoppers and a few of them actually help my back.

1. Built-in USB hub in the monitor isn't recognized by XP pro on my laptop
2. The monitor runs at 1280x1024
3. I have to used an external keyboard and mouse
4. My desk has a lot more wires on it
5. I had to remove my iMac from the desk

I think #1 could be solved if I worked the problem long enough. But I just plug my USB keyboard (that I retrieved from the trash!) and my optical mouse (which I paid for [bah!]) directly into the laptop. #2 and #3 actually forced me to create an ergonomically healthier workplace and that was the point of the excerise anyway. As for removing the iMac, that's not going to affect my day-to-day productivity at all, since I rarely turn it on.

Really, my only complaint is about the wires on my desk. Which I admit is a pretty weak lament. So, it's all very, very good for jjohn.

Capitalism! Whodda thunk it would work?

It's been a while since I reported on that unique brand of entertainment available only from my apartment's window that I call "McDonald's Parking Lot Theatre." Tonight's performer wasn't human, but an automaton of lumbering seventies exuberance and existentialist horror.

Today, the weather had finally begun to take on spring-like attributes here in Boston. The past few days have been delightfully cool, with no hint of winter. Today was especially delightful: dry, blue and as sunny as a four-year-old in a candy shop. Workmen continue to feverishly finish up the new deck of Fenway park before opening day (in a week or so). Even now as I write this, the large, UFO-like lights of the park shine through my bedroom windows.

At some point this evening, the relentless grind of dance music began wafting through my apartment. It's the city. It's a warm night. That sort of thing is to be expected. But the music persisted. Was it coming from the park? I moved to investigate.

Although the jumbotron was active, it didn't appear that there was a formal event at the park (sadly, I can tell the difference). I looked down in the parking lot of McDonald's and to my horror, I saw a white metal contraption, filthy with lurid lights, flashing and beguiling. It was like a tour bus of familiar design seen throughout Boston during the day, but this one was festooned with blinky lights and a thrumming subwoofer pounding out dance music to its unseen and sullen passenagers.

The driver left the mobile party in the parking lot while he got a shake or something inside. The delay was long enough for me to get this picture and then the party bus moved on. Fear! Fear and loathing in the streets of Boston! Ai!

I will attempt to remember to grab the camera when I next see the stretch SUVs so popular for bachelorette parties.

Today's example of how history books lie to us comes from ReasonOnline, who attempts to put Trent Lott's racist remarks in a wider context of historical federal racism:

«Obviously, Southern hopes that Wilson could force blacks into servility were always delusional. Nevertheless, Wilson's Jim Crow presidency remained an available model for segregationists and supremacists who came later. Thurmond and his fellow Dixiecrats didn't necessarily require a model of triumphalist racism, but the point is that in Wilson they had one. »

But I thought Wilson was a progressive and a peacnik!
He's on The List now too.

Dear log,

Even at 34 years old, I still catch myself thinking "I wonder what I'll do when I grow up?" At some point, I think I'll have to come to terms that I have, in truth, already grown up and that the answer to my question is: pretty much what you did yesterday.

Someday, I'll make this blog valid HTML 4 transitional. HTML/XML is just too weird.

I covered another Erik Carter song, this one called Except me. This is one of my favorites from Erik's band Mumble and Peg.

This arrangement features me on piano, which was cleaned up only in a few spots. The mix was enhanced with Sonic Maximizer, which does help (surprisingly). It's a slow song, but definitely not easy listening. Enjoy.

The life of a bachelor isn't always an easy one, as this sound clip from Simpson's attests too. Clearly, he needs a better class of junk mail.

For years, I've been living a double life. While to the world, I appeared to be an aging programmer and failed musician, the truth was much more sinister. Hidden from everyone, including me, was the ugly, sick truth that this Internet questionnairre exposed.

I am an elf.

And not just an elf, but a capricious, chaotic neutral one at that. A danger to society and friends alike, I march to the blind, mad beat of my own secret drummer. Which explains my secret profession: traveling bard.

They say that admitting you have a problem is the first stage of recovery. Well, so be it.

I am a chaotic neutral elf. Love me for who I am!

The Internet is full of purile, hurtful garbage of the kind that does no one any good. The movie linked to above is perfect example of this.

Why did I make a local cache of it then? Evidence!

UPDATE: Because irony doesn't always transmit well on the interweb, please note that, despite what I said above, I actually enjoyed this little grotesquery. Would I really serve media I disliked?

Recently, I had to clear out an inbox with 7.5K messages in it. Two were real emails to me about some SOAP articles I had written. About 6 messages were either email digests I had signed up for or other legitimate notifications from services I specifically signed up for. The inbox had been collecting email since I last cleared it out in December, aught five.

I guess a 750-1 ratio of spam to legitimate email is good, right?

There were some interesting gems in the subject lines of some of the deleted spam. I'll share these with you now.

• Cormorant is Treachery of 9 (which is entirely true)
• Fat boy please respond with info (let's cut to the chaseâ¦)
• What? Die?? (written by Sartre)
• Do you remember that? Weather
  (everyone talks about it, but no one does anything about it)
• Timely Narcotic Offer (too late for me)

Copyright Bonestell Space Art, used with permission

From time to time, I hear friends, politicians, even comedians I like dismiss the need for a space program. The most common argument against space exploration is "why bother?" Opponents argue that earth-based telescopes (radio and visual), along with a few orbitable telescope platforms should be more than enough for the eggheads to get their fix. Further, don't we have a moral obligation to spend those considerable resources of NASA on social programs or the homeland security? Wouldn't that be both more practical and more profitable use of our time and money?

At the heart of the argument against space exploration is a profound terrestial provencialism that places Earth not only at the center of the universe, but reduces the worth of the universe to only what can be found on this tilted, flattened 6 sextillion ton mudball, currently the third planet from a middle-aged star that floats (for now) in the outer edge of an arm of a spiral (barred?) galaxy that's part of a supercluster of galaxies for which we don't even have a good name yet (n.b. Local Group is a label that fails to stimulate the blood).

There are a number of utilitarian arguments I could employ in defense of space exploration. It's true that as we destroy our habitat through "livin' large" that learning to live in a hostile environment might be useful. It's true that space exploration has already generated new, practical technologies we use every day. It's also true that federal money spent on the space program goes into the pockets of American private business (just like military spending, but with a smaller body count). But all these important reasons don't really matter to me that much. There is a vastly more important reason to Look Up.

A government must protect its citizens. We can debate about what that means and what policies are appropriate towards that goal. But I also believe that a government can do more than just the bare minimum. Together government and private industries can work to do something quite remarkable: change the very character of humanity. Of all government programs, only space exploration can do this.

No doubt you'll think this claim grandiose. How can space exploration change us as a species? Discounting genetic mutations induced by poorly shielded astronauts, the change I'm referring to is one of perspective. Humans have, throughout history, considered the universe only in their own local contexts. The result has been fierce territorial warfare, social dominance hierarchies and rather merger plans for the future.

Humans, though related to every other terrestrial animal, is uniquely gifted with the capacity to change our behavior and our thinking. Further, we are increasingly unfettered by the primary mechanism that shapes all other life on this planet: natural selection. Unlike every other lifeform that we know about, we can decide our destiny.

As the late Carl Sagan pointed out many times, we are made of starstuff. Every atom on this planet Earth was born in star that exploded in the murky depths of time. This isn't mythology. This isn't belief. It is, as much as anything in science can be called such, fact and a most remarkable one at that. In that some of those same atoms compose each of us today, we can be considered sentient starstuff. Which is a romantic way of saying we are part of this universe as much as any black hole, sun, or quasar. We are the descendants of those awesome, irradiating engines of gravity. Shouldn't we consider getting to know our roots, in the largest sense of the term? How can we really know ourselves without understanding where we came from?

The probability is that we will one day find that life has arisen separately on some other world and I suspect, despite some superficial differences, that this alien life will be much the same as we. It will be life based on some replicating set of amino acids (perhaps even the same acids). It will have a desire to feed. It will have a desire to procreate. No matter if what we find is a microbe or a giant balloon predator, it will broadly conform to life as we know it. I hope I live to see that glorious day when we learn aren't alone or special or unique. That hubris has been exploited by religious and political leaders of this planet for far too long.

If an appeal to cosmic geneology isn't sufficient to pursuade you of the importance of the space program, allow me to put a fine point on our pitiful, parochial understanding of the universe in which we live. Most humans walk at the speed of about 5 km per hour. The Earth's diameter at the equator is about 12,700 km. Using simple math, it would take the average human 2,540 hours to walk that distance (if he could). That's well over three months of walking non-stop with no sleeping. The nearest non-earth, non-manufactured thing in space, the Moon, is about 383,000 km away. That's 30 times the diameter of the Earth. If you could walk to the Moon, it would take you 7 years of continuous walking (in a space suit) to get there. Our closest neighbor after the Moon is Mars, which, at its closest, is 54,500,000 km away. I won't bother putting that distance in walking terms.

The careful reader will notice that each of the distances cited differ in orders of magnitude, even in the context of our closest neighbors in the Solar System. Space is vast and we have little hope of exploring it all, but to stop exploring it at now or to do so anemically seems to be the height of solipsistic folly. If we are the only self-aware creatures the universe has created, we have the moral obligation to understand this creation to the best of our ability.

In 10,000 years of organized human civilization, only the very last decades have seen a few, brief day trips to our closest neighbor. In 10,000 years of human civilization, we have yet to explore the entire planet beneath our feet (although, thanks to space travel, we finally have reliable maps of it).

Achieving a hi-tech culture on Earth isn't the end of our voyage. It's the beginning. Although triremes opened the seas to exploration, travel and trade to our ancestors, those ancient ships weren't the end of the story; nor were the ocean going Galleys of the Age of Discovery; nor are the primative sub-orbital rockets of today. The story of discovery continues.

The change in humanity induced by routine space travel that I referred to at the beginning of this essay could be as profound as evolving sentience. The questions posed by space exploration challenge the very context of how we perceive ourselves. You cannot look down on Earth from space and perceive nations, religions, genders or races. There is only Earth and from a distance, it looks just like one of many, many planets in the community we call the Universe.

Which is why I included the Bonestell painting at the top of this article. With all the local noise, it's easy to get distracted from the Big Picture.

Can I get an Amen? (local mirror [34MB]) is a short film mediation on the history of perhaps the most important drum sample ever and the implications of assigning, protecting and enforcing the copyright of that sample. Best of all, the essay was recorded to an acetate album, which is played back as the film's narrative.

The Amen beat will be instantly familiar when you hear it. I connect this beat most strongly with the Powerpuff Girls theme and Bowie's Earthling album. Since the sample has been used since the late eighties, you'll have your own ideas about it.

For the record, I think that it's high time to use modern, living drummers to create samples for new music. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being inspired by old recordings and even pinching a bar or three from them. I'm all for recontextualization of audio samples, but I think this 6 seconds of drumming has had its fifteen minutes of fame.

Certainly, this film essay is appropriate as "smash-ups" like Q-Unit and the Kleptones are really blurring the lines of copyright.

At first, I thought the following article was a piece of right-wing propaganda about lefties not supporting the troops. And then I read more about the protesters. And then I laughed. It's nice to see that conservatives are not a monolithic horde of dittoheads. There are some true freaks in the crowd too.

There's hope for the Mushyheaded Middle yet.

From the Associated Press:

«FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. Wearing leather chaps and vests covered in military patches, a band of motorcyclists rolls from one soldier's funeral to another in hopes their respectful cheers and revving engines will drown out the insults of protesters.

The motorcycle club members calling themselves Patriot Guard Riders are trying to shield mourners from cruel jeers by adherents of a tiny fundamentalist church who picket military funerals to reflect their belief that U.S. combat deaths are a sign God is punishing the United States for harboring homosexuals. Some protesters' signs said, "Thank God for IEDs," the improvised explosive devices, or homemade bombs, that kill many U.S. soldiers. »

Frequently, I find that my funny bone is at odds with my libido. This goes a long way to explaining the rather extended stretch of "singlehood" I've endured. Still, you have to prioritize in life. If I have to choose between having my cake and eating it too, I'll opt for smushing someone's face into the pastry.

That also may account for the bachelorhood thing.

What follows is a message I sent to the owner of the above picture, who chose this to the first image potential suitors would see of her.

Subject: Congratulations!

Body:

Howdy,

Of all the pictures I've seen in personal ads across many web sites, yours wins the impressive distinction of best picture posed with the deadliest live animal.

I, as a former cat owner, would be suspicious of the rather meager chain restraining that tiger. It does appear that you found the good side of his nature though.

One other dubious point of commonality between us is a fondness for board games. Through very little fault of my own, I cohosted a show on Somerville cable access about non-electronic games called The Gameshelf. There's a whole world of new games out there beyond the classics of monopoly, risk, chess, and scrabble.

In any case, take care.

âJoe

In so many ways, I'm really, really awesome. And yet, in exactly the same ways, I'm an idiot too.

Here's a recipe for a pretty simple, yet tasty stir fry sauce. Because the key is to reduce the sauce, you should make this up before cooking up the meat and veggies of the main dish.

Ingredients:

• soy sauce (about 4 oz.)
• water (about 6 oz.)
• garlic (4-6 cloves)
• fresh ginger (about the same mass as the garlic)
• brown sugar (2 oz.)
• corn starch slurry (1 tsp of c.s.)
• hoisin sauce (1 tbsp)

Preparation:

Peel and dice the garlic and ginger. You don't need too fine a dice as you'll be straining this out of the final sauce. In a sauce pan over low heat, sweat the garlic and ginger together for about five to ten minutes. Add the soy sauce, water, hoisin sauce and sugar to the pan. Bring to a boil for 4 minutes. Add the corn starch slurry (which is just cold water and corn starched mixed together thoroughly). Whisk or stir vigorously to thicken. Let the mixure simmer on a low boil until it's the consistency of maple syrup. Strain garlic and ginger bits out of the sauce and store in the fridge until Judgement Day.

I promise this simple sauce made with fresh ingredients will beat anything else on your local mega-mart's shelves. Lord knows, that's not a tall order in my neighborhood.

My adolescence was in the 1980s. Those that tell me the 80s were cool clearly did not live through them. As evidence of the brutal psychological torment inflicted on me and others of my generation, I submit this shocking archive footage. Music, in the wrong hands on the wrong drugs, can become a weapon of mass destruction (and suckitude).

At least Stevie Wonder never saw the disaster that unfolded around him.

After a good deal of hardware problems, I believe I have stabilize my digital infrastructure at home. Using the very excellent True Image from Acronis, I imaged the new and failing Samsung hard drive in my XP box. I then restored that image to a new and not failing Western Digital disk. The machine booted without incident and so I could put by living room back into order, instead of having look like a computer workbench.

I also restructured the "computer lab" in my bedroom so that it is neater, cleaner and properly wired. This includes some clever reworking of two machines running VMWare ESX 2.X and sharing two small SCSI disks across the same SCSI ribbon. This simulates a SAN very nicely for me. The disks run off a hacked power supply unit. It's all very sketchy, but it works.

Also, on permanent loan from Leostream is an old IBM Netfinity server. After the current project is done, I may attempt to install ESX 3.0 onto it.

To recap: my XP box in the living is now stable. It's my digital media convergence box that is my TV, DVD player and stereo. My bedroom lab hosts both my digital audio workstation (Sonar 4) and my machines for Leostream development.

Of course, my Linux soft-RAID1 box is in the hall closet.

Character actor Andreas Katsulas, most remembered by me for playing G'Kar on Babylon 5, has died of lung cancer. From the numerous references to his smoking habit made by JMS on the B5 DVDs, I'm not surprised at the cause of death. That doesn't lessen the impact though. Andreas was always engaging to watch in whatever show he was in.

Requiescat in pace.

Check out the new album, called Lurid, in taskboy's music section. It took over three years from the start of tracking the opening title Rusted Gunnels to get to the final mix. Whew! Special thanks to Nate Patwardhan for lending me all of his formidable music talent and use of his home studio. Also, Ira Schwartz, who drums on "Rusted Gunnels," has become my personnal percussion savior.

I think there's a little something for every one on this collection.

It's true what they say: art is never finished, only abandoned.

From the I'm getting too old for neologisms department comes this bit of carnal knowledge from New York Magazine: (via TorgoX)

«"The interesting kids kind of gravitate towards each other," Elle had explained earlier. "A lot of them are heteroflexible or bisexual or gay. And what happens is, like, we're all just really comfortable around each other."»

I'm pretty sure that my Generation X will be remember most as that generation that fell between the sex-crazied 60's and the sex-crazied 90's, who spent their formative years in the fearful shadow of AIDS and Nancy Reagan.

God. Damn. It.

Recently, I had to wade deeper into the murky, fetid waters of JavaScript. Like an encounter with a cheap hooker, a session coding with JavaScript makes me want to shower and weep. What I had to struggle with on this occasion was JavaScript's notion of associative arrays, which are implemented as Objects. All you Perler, Pythons and Rubyists out there, hold on! It's not that associative arrays are a type of object in JavaScript, it's that Objects are associative arrays (have I BLOWN your MIND yet, Java?).

Normally languages which provide associative arrays also build in routines to list the keys, the values or both from an instance of these variables. Not JavaScript. It's true that you can iterate through an Object's attributes with a for/in loop, but that's a bit like using a hammer to repair a watch, which is an analogy that also holds for parsing query strings in URLs with JS. What a nightmare. It's always 1996 in JavaScript's world.

Weirded out yet? Wait! I've held the most offensive bit of JavaScript classes for last. In nearly every other God-fearing lanaguage I've used, Objects are declared. That is, the object's attributes and methods are defined (usually) before an instance of that class can be used. So JavaScript, whose name clings to the fame of that paragon of OO-design Java, should have some kind of class declaration, right? I mean, declaring a class would make inheritence and object inspection easier and thus leverage the the major benefit of Object Oriented (OO) programming, right? Therefore, JS must have class declarations. But sadly, this isn't the case. JavaScript sports Classless objects. Objects in JS are defined at run time procedurally, in what seems to be an attempt to make the brains of OO zealots melt.

Classes without an inheritence mechanism are like pants without bottoms and only David Lee Roth could get away with wearing assless pants.

How does JavaScript allow users to define their own classes? You make a generic Object and start assigning methods and attributes to it, as if it were a dictionary, which it really is! How does object inheritence work? Not very well, but you can try assigning to the pseudo-attribute .prototype. Or not. Apparently, prototype is sort of busted.

Another consequence of not having classes is that you can never find out what kind of Object you're dealing. That is, you can't ask an object, "what class do you belong to, little fella?" The confused bastard will answer "I'm an Object Object," which sounds a little desperate â like the JS object really wants you to believe it's a first class object, which it isn't. This reminds me of a common folklore tenet in which all things have a Truename that, if uttered, will give the speaker power over that thing. Are JS objects superstitious? It's true you can "override" (or overwrite) the .toString method with something about the class name, but that's hackiferic.

Anyway, why bother with class heirarchies? Most JS scripts last only a short while and have so limited a scope. Then again, why bother pretending to have objects at all? Let's call a hash "a hash" and be done with it.

Classless classes are the assless pants of the Internet.

As I was walking around my 'hood today, a fellow was walking his dog. It's the Fens; that sort of thing happens a lot. Like most urban areas, Boston has some pretty clear ordinances about cleaning up after your pet's defecation. It's not uncommon to see an owner of a dog carrying a plastic bag of dog poop in one hand and being dragging along by the dog leash in the other. However, there was an additional element in the offing today that led to tragedy: the fairly cold wintry weather of the Northeast.

As a guard against the cold, this fellow (and many others, I noticed) had a warm cup a' joe with him. What could possibly go wrong?

As I passed this fellow, he had just finished picking up after his dog, like a good citizen. However, he had to hold three things in his two hands simultaneously: the coffee, the dog leash and the poop. For reasons best left to the reader's mind, he chose to allocate one hand solely to the task of managing the dog leash and to the other hand fell the twin responsibilities of holding the coffee and the bag of poop!

Needless to say, my delicate and refined sensibilities were bruised.

I can only think of one take away from this: should you find yourself in a similar situation, consider letting the dog run wildly into traffic or not feeding the animal until spring. My Solomon-like wisdom is presented here free of charge.

Senator Hillary Clinton (D. NY) said, at a Baptist church on MLK day that:

«"when you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation - and you know what I am talking about."»

While I share her frustration with the Republican controlled House, I'm disappointed she chose to invoke this painful ghost of U.S. slavery in a misguided analogy of current politics. On plantations, slaves were subjected to subhuman cruelty and degradation. To suggest that the Republicans are treating the Dems even remotely like this is insulting, inaccurate and distastful. Does pandering get lower this this?

The Democrats seem to continually pick minority positions on important issues and grandstand on stupid things (the bruhaha over GTA is a good example of this). American Democracy favors the majority party. The Dems need to get in the damn race and stop blaming the Republicans for understanding civics.

Say, isn't Karl Rove looking for some new friends now?

Volity is a p2p gaming system for computer versions of board games. This project is fairly new, but there are several games already to choose from including Barsoomite Go, which is like traditional Go, but played with Icehouse pieces. The screenshot above shows my crushing defeat of a hapless go-bot.

I no longer fear the coming of robots. Their simple alpha-omega pruning AI is no match for my madd skillz.

It's new installment of "Leave it Bush". It's got both Chris Walken and Sam Jackson. What's not to like?

Watch it.

Later, you too can buy some horse pants.

Ego surfing, in which you try to find other online references to yourself, is a time-honored tradition of the net that became ubiquitous with web search engines. I suspect that ancient proto-netizens used to look through archives of newsgroups to find themselves too, but the fossil record is unclear on this point. In any case, I'd like to push the start of the art in ego-surfing to the new frontier of social bookmarking.

Some of you will already know about del.icio.us, the clever site that lets you share your bookmarks with other people. One of the interesting features of the site is that it tells you how many other people have bookmarked the same URL. In this way, you can get a sense for the general popularity of a site. For instance, 3708 people have bookmarked google.com (for reasons that are unclear to me). Slashdot.org has been bookmarked 13,473 times. The Funeral Quest product page has been noted by only three people, including myself.

In my copious spare time, I began to wonder if anything I've written has been noted by anyone (outside of family). Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Here's how del.icio.us users remember me:

1. why PHP 0wnz mod_perl: 15 other people
2. Journal of jjohn: Snow Fudge, a recipe: 1 person
3. Intelligent Design critique: 1 person
4. Markov Blogger code: 1person

According to del.icio.us, I'm best remembered for slagging Perl, ID and blogging. Super! I'm pretty happy that someone found my fudge recipe interesting enough to remember.

There's a lot of money to be made feeding people's egos. Think of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and social networking sites like orkut and friendster and more generic hangouts like myspace. Clearly, there's some kind of business opportunity in ego massaging.

Must remember that next time I talk to VCs.