Nice post by Evan Broder discussing an interesting approach to implementing user space file systems. The key trick is to treat filesystem request handling similar to URL request routing.

Linux, and other UNIX like operating systems, have long had support for implementing

filesystems in user space. This allows hackers to hide all kinds of interesting computation and services behind a (the?) core UNIX abstraction. Performance and support (a.k.a. FUSE) on modern machines has gotten so good, you can even implement filesystems using Python.

As part of implementing the filesystem, a module has to translate request against pathnames into responses. Sounds remarkably familiar. HTTP servers have to do the same thing. Even better, web application frameworks and stacks like Djangon and Ruby on Rails do as well. Thus, there’s been a significant amount of effort put in by the developer community to come up with idiomatic ways to cleanly and flexibly deal with this dispatch. For example, Python’s Routes module.

Smooshing the URL routing concept into FUSE support leads to RouteFS, “A FUSE API wrapper based on URL routing”. Broder then goes on to demonstrates a toy virtual filesystem that accesses github, but also points to his virtual machine work on Invirt as a more serious usage of the approach.

Moby hack!

Link parkin’: Shogun is an open source machine learning C++ toolkit with wrappers for Octave, Matlab, R, and Python. Shogun focuses on SVM (Support Vector Machine) kernels. At least the web site has nice spit and polish, hopefully reflecting well on the library.

Now if I only understood the theory behind SVMS, at all.

Glenn Fleishman drills into the details of Virgin Mobile’s MiFi based pre-paid mobile broadband service. He compares and contrasts with Apple’s current 3G products, AT&T data service for the iPhone and iPad, but it provides a useful framework to consider Virgin Mobile’s utility.

While there is a premium on the cost per byte due to not having a contract, the delta isn’t outrageous. As one commenter points out, on a contract you’re in for $720 a year, whereas you may be able to more reasonably meter yourself with Virgin Mobile.

The only other downside appears to be, as another commenter points out, the relative lack of convenience of the MiFi vice the instant connectivity of the iPad or iPhone.

The days off in Chicago and the flight time let me quickly knock out Fritz Leiber’s Swords in the Mist, the third collection of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories.

This one was a little uneven. There’s really only four substantive stories, The Cloud of Hate, Lean Times in Lankhmar, When the Sea-King’s Away, and Adept’s Gambit. Their Mistress the Sea and The Wrong Branch are basically just short fillers to paper over some continuity.

The highlight is Lean Times in Lankhmar, arguably one of the best and funniest Fafhrd and Mouser tales, and greatly highlights their unique brotherhood. Unlike your typical fantasy tale, this one eschews dark horrors, evil wizardry, and devious palace intrigues for common street religion. Despite their numerous adventures together, Fafhrd and the Mouser part ways in the face of tough times on the streets of the black togaed city. Fafhrd takes up religion while the Mouser joins in with an extortionist who plunders the priests of the gods in Lankhmar. Needless to say the Mouser and Fafhrd wind up on a collision course to entertaining effect.

Meanwhile, the extended novella Adept’s Gambit, while having all the elements of a good Fafhrd and Mouser yarn, is a bit off because the two are placed not in Lankhmar but right here on Earth. Plus, there’s extensive interaction with Ningauble of the Seven Eyes, yet nary an appearance from Sheelba of the Eyeless Face. Just weird.

Meanwhile, The Cloud of Hate, while mildly funny, and the richly detailed When the Sea-King’s Away, were both eminently forgettable.

Interestingly, I never knew Howard Chaykin (one of my favorite comic book authors) pitched in on a comic adaptation of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Might have to try and dig those up.

Nine books down for the year.

Been in Chicago the past couple of days, enjoying company with some old friends and visiting some old haunts. Things that stood out:

• The funky urban melange of Lincoln Square. All types of folks in a nice little neighborhood, combining single family homes, dense courtyard walkups, family storefronts, and anchored by the Old Town School of Folk Music on Lincoln Ave. Nothing like seeing a punk looking dude, with piercings and tons of skin art, pushing a baby buggy.

• The friendliness of folks taking a casual stroll in the Beverly neighborhood.

• The convenience of Metra and The El.

• The Harold Washington Library Center. Despite having lived in Chicago for eight years, I’d never visited this library. Stoopid! Interesting architecture on the outside, and very nice on the inside. Free Wi-Fi and you can even use a desktop computer as an out of state guest.

• A good old Chicago Polish hot dog.

Link parkin’: apsw, “Another Python SQLite Wrapper”. apsw attempts to be a much thinner wrapping around the SQLite C library to better support some of that DB engine’s quirks.

Continuing the swords and sorcery revival reading tour, I knocked out Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Adventurer. Similar to Conan of Cimmeria, Adventurer is a collection of short stories. Three are Howard originals, while one, Drums of Tombalku, was completed from a posthumously discovered partial draft plus outline. L. Sprague De Camp did the writing honors to complete this fourth story.

Three of the four stories are straight up pulp fiction from the mid-30’s. (This is really old stuff!) The People of the Black Circle, The Slithering Shadow, and The Pool of The Black One are all emblematic of Howard’s style. Conan gets into scrapes amongst dark, ancient civilizations, faces some obscene horror, kills the beast, rescues the girl, and manages to win the day. This also includes Howard’s florid expository prose such as the following from his half of Drums of Tombalku:

The house of the god — the full horror of the phrase filled his mind. All the ancestral fears and the fears that reached beyond ancestry and primordial race memory crowded upon him; horror cosmic and unhaman sickened him. The realization of his weak humanity crushed him as he went through the house of darkness, which was the house of a god.

Interestingly, each story also prominently features a female character. While in Howard’s writing they’re of various depths, each woman is at least as well developed as Conan. Often moreso, since Conan is such an archetype he really doesn’t need much detailing.

Where De Camp falls down is in matching Howard’s stylings and in character development, especially women. Drums of Tombalku brings this in sharp relief, where half was written by Howard, and half by De Camp. The first half moves, projects an air of menacing doom, and is entertaining. The second half just sort of moves the players around in a lame palace intrigue plot. Lissa, the female character, simply disappears in the second half. Plus there’s some cheesy pastiches of Africans and Arabs masquerading as characters. Guess which author wrote which?

I’m actually starting to appreciate Howard’s style. It’s definitely from a different era, but it really does represent the pulpy flavor of the times. And his stories are a pretty easy read to boot.

Eight books down for the year.

Link parkin’: SproutCore is a JavaScript library for building interactive applications within the browser:

SproutCore is a tool for building applications. It has more in common with Cocoa or .NET than jQuery or MooTools. Because of that, SproutCore will change the way you think about building web apps.

WebKit, JavaScript, and HTML 5 seem to be Apple’s answer to open development, vice the App Store. Then the question is how close can a platform like SproutCore come to the fit and finish, spit and polish, of native Cocoa Touch applications?

Today I did some really simple timing runs, can’t even glorify them as experiments, with wirebin, which I grabbed from Slide’s open source repository. Initial indications are that wirebin is pretty freaking fast.

I generated a Python list of 1 million random integers, ranging from 1 to 1 million. wirebin can serialize that datastructure in 43 milliseconds and deserialize in 51 milliseconds. This is on my bottom of the line, going on two years old, MacBook. A round trip of such a list, representing an edge list for a node in a graph say, would take roughly a tenth of second. Keep in mind, this is a pretty big edge list for a single node. For most real world graphs, you’re probably looking at four or five orders of magnitude smaller.

So I did the quick and dirty timings for lists of 100 integers. We’re talking about 8 microseconds for a serialize/deserialize cycle, which would be over 120000 updates per second.

Where is this going? Getting back to my mental canoodling about Python, prefuse, and SQLite, one issue is representing graphs with tables. prefuse stores edge lists directly in the tables so it doesn’t have to do an expensive “SQL” query to find all the edges in or out of a node. A cheap id lookup can be used to pull out the edge list.

If you’re going to do the same trick with python and SQLite, an obvious route is to store Python lists in SQLite. But that’s not supported natively. Luckily the Python SQLite module allows you to easily extend a database connection with custom object serialization and deserialization. Thanks to wirebin, that looks like it wouldn’t be a performance bottleneck.

More to come…

My iPod Touch is definitely having an impact on my personal social media browsing. I don’t update often, but I follow a few folks on Twitter and Facebook. I used to do that from my laptop. Twitter using the Twitter desktop app, nee Tweetie. Facebook I’d login to over the Web. Now I exclusively check both sites from iPod Touch using TweetDeck. Fast, efficient, and low stress.

Checking these sites from the desktop now seems weird. And I only do it when I have some casual time to pick up the Touch, not out of some sense of obligation.

I have the iPhone apps for both Twitter and Facebook. The former doesn’t display some logo thumbnail pics correctly. The latter does some things better than TweetDeck, but not enough to overcome the convenience of having one goto app.

Again, just another observation of how quickly some habits can be changed, given a distinctive enough technological leap.

Sometimes you’re reminded of old friends that you hadn’t given a thought to in ages. Then you realize you really miss them and wish they were around again.

808 State’s Cubik is one of those old friends. I remember using two 12 inches of this track for one of my earliest DJ tricks, a simple jet/flange. Bought, although it’s not exactly the Pan American Excursion mix, which is the true classic.

Link parkin’: Slide Inc recently released a bunch of open source code, mostly Python. I’m especially interested in wirebin, a fast serialization library for native Python types.

Via Simon Willison

So I was kvetching a little about ESPN providing some local color in its World Cup coverage, (Just a minor kvetch!), so I have to give them some props today. During halftime of the replay of Netherlands-Uruguay, they turned over some studio time to Julie Foudy and her work with GlobalGirl Media. While the on-air piece wasn’t strictly World Cup related, they do have a couple of football related pieces on the site.

Good on ya ESPN!

Well at least one other person with credibility, Jesper of Waffle Software, seems to think Apple might be in (getting into?) a position to sanction a new development language. Jesper calls it “xlang” and thinks it’s meant to surpass Objective-C. But not replace it. Good comments as well on Jesper’s Surpass post.

Jibes a bit with my theoretical out gambit for Apple and Section 3.3.1. Especially since Apple sponsors and contributes personnel time to MacRuby and heavily uses LLVM.

And I had forgotten John Siracusa’s in-depth projection of the future of Mac OS, including a heavy dose of what could happen to Objective-C.

Ran across this word while reading Josh Marshall’s note about how New York is taking its waterfront back from the industrial and commercial concerns that have traditionally owned that essential real estate.

entrepôt, ˈäntrəˌpō

1. noun ( pl. -pôts pronunc. same or |-ˌpōz|)
   a port, city, or other center to which goods are brought for import and export, and for collection and distribution.

This according to my Mac OS X Dictionary application. Seems like a word apropos of Elle Driver’s fetish for gargantuan.

I’ve always liked that word… “entrepot”… so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.

Of course the Chicagoan in me wants to point out that New York is simply trying to catch up to Chicago on the public space front. ;-/

Back in April, Apple announced adjustments to its guidelines for App Store application approval. Of course as an Apple customer, Apple observer, and programming language enthusiast I had to take notice. At the time, I read the condition that

… Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs…

as a bit extreme, although I didn’t descend into the histrionics that quite a few other folks did.

I immediately thought of all the dynamic languages (Common Lisp, Scheme, Python, Lua, Ruby, etc.) that were now essentially verboten. Sure these languages would be a distinct micro-minority of the tools used to develop iPhone apps, but they allowed for a vibrant community of potentially radically innovative tinkerers. Besides, folks using these languages weren’t so much looking to be cross platform as rapid experimenters or hyper-productive.

Thinking a little sideways, I wonder if Apple couldn’t assuage quite a few folks by releasing an Apple sanctioned and maintained high level development environment. Pick a language you’ve got a lot of smart run-time engineers already on staff for (JavaScript?), build out some nice Cocoa Touch libraries in the language, maybe provide a nice client engine, and call it the next generation of HyperCard.

Alternatively, buy a small company (e.g. Runtime Revolution) that has the existing intellectual resources to make this happen. Or even just contract out with one to provide the environment in perpetuity. I’m sure Apple’s lawyers could write language or come up with an agreement such that Apple still maintained the necessary platform control.

Then again Apple might just argue that Safari, JavaScript, and the Web are already fulfilling that role of alternative application environment.

Continue on for a linkdump of articles, mostly just here for posterity and future referencey, that helped inform my thoughts.

I’ve been collecting varied reactions and analyses over the past few months to shape my thinking. With a little distance here’s some of the best:

• Jason Snell had a fairly lucid and coherent analysis of all of the iPhone OS 4 announcements, shortly after they surfaced.

• ArsTechnica’s John Siracusa, Mac tech analyst extraordinaire, framed the strategy as Apple’s big bet for dominance.

• Ian Bogost’s Flash is not a Right was a useful tonic to those proclaiming the lack of Flash as somehow a crime.

• While anthropomorphizing a tad too much, Mark Bernstein may have captured some of the emotion behind Apple’s desire for Platform Control.

• Of course John Gruber got in a couple of good ones, including thinking of smartphones as app consoles, This is how Apple rolls on how Apple works, Apple’s case against cross-platform middleware, and the consequences of some of the casualties.

• Finally, it looks like Apple might be shifting a bit to reduce some of the collateral damage.

Just a quickie for the holiday. I’d also parked Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake on the DVR and just got around to watching the flick. Another well done British crime thriller from the same producer (not director) of Snatch, although not nearly as frenetic or comedic.

Layer Cake makes up for it though by being slightly more probing of British class dynamics and having a few more surprises up its sleeve. Also, the Sienna Miller/Daniel Craig relationship has some real sparks. Very judiciously applied, I’m torn as to whether a little more of those two together would have made for a better film.

There’s something about the modern Brit gangster flick that’s definitely missing in today’s American cinema. It’s almost as if Goodfellas pretty much closed the book on stylish gangster tales for this side of the pond. In light of my string of recent discoveries, I’m wondering if there isn’t a whole lot more where Snatch, RocknRolla, and Layer Cake came from.

Update. Somewhat formulaic, but an interesting backgrounder on Layer Cake from celebritywonder.com.

I completed Fritz Leiber’s Swords Against Death, the second collection of his short stories chronicling the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. The most intriguing thing about this set of tales is the varied publishing years. The earliest, and first ever Fafhrd and Mouser piece, The Jewels in the Forest appeared in 1939. The Price of Pain-Ease and The Circle Curse were released in 1970.

This disparity in ages leads to some distinctly different storytelling and writing styles. As always, Leiber brings a quite pleasurable sophistication to basic heroic swords and sorcery. Of the bunch, The Howling Tower, Thieves House, Claws from the Night, and The Price of Pain-Ease are my favorites. The Howling Tower is quite dark and disturbing, tending towards horror. The Price of Pain-Ease humorously solidifies the bonds between Fafhard and the Mouser with Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes.

Swords Against Death isn’t fabulous, but it is a notch above Elric of Melnibone and a refreshing tonic relative to Conan the Barbarian.

7th book of the year down.

Over there to the left is my ancient “smartphone”, the Nokia 6620. The thing is so old it has a Cingular logo for a background.

Today, using the little joystick at the center of the phone, I was scrolling through my contacts looking for a phone number. When the one I was searching for finally came up, I started tapping its row with my thumb. Tap, tap, tap. Why isn’t this thing working?

Oh yeah, it’s not an iPod Touch.

Keep in mind I’ve only had a Touch for a month and I don’t make any calls with it. Yet somehow I have “muscle memory” for Apple’s user interface, on any handheld screen device. Granted, I had just been using my Touch to do some feed reading, but I was still surprised by my own behavior.

Maybe it’s a sign to get cracking and get a new smartphone.

William Deresiewicz’s essay entitled Solitude and Leadership, hosted on theamericanscholar.org, may have been the best piece I’ve read in quite a while. Well worth the time to make a focused, concentrated reading. Don’t scan the essay (not skim) even though the temptation is there since it’s on the Web.

I don’t claim to know squat about leadership, but I resonate with the need for concentrated reflection. Not just for leaders, but for all folks who want to be substantive achievers. At some point you really have to grapple with what you believe in preparation for defending your position.

How can you know that unless you’ve taken counsel with yourself in solitude? I started by noting that solitude and leadership would seem to be contradictory things. But it seems to me that solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.

I disagree with him, mainly on degree, in regards to electronic media. Carefully exposing yourself to the more emotional and fleeting aspects of the modern world can provide mental calisthenics. Yeah, the constant cell phone checking looking for new texts, or Tweets, or check-ins, or wall posts strikes me as pathetic. Reading with a critical eye the flotsam and jetsam of the Web can help sharpen your bullshit detectors though. Then again I earn my living by being steeped in the stuff.

…was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

According to MetaFilter, today is Neuromancer‘s birthday. Still love this book and think it holds up well after 26 years.

I’m tempted to get a new MetaFilter account just to smack the MeFites who are calling Neuromancer irrelevant and overtaken by the passage of time. If you move past the computing tropes that Gibson created (jacking in, cyberspace, hacking runs) and focus on the hyper-globalization (instantaneous travel anywhere on the globe and even off of it, swirling merge of ethnicities and cultures), the personification of massive wealth (corporate and family), and media hacking as a weapon (remember that “terrorist” attack on SenseNet?) it’s still pretty damn relevant.

Frankly, Gibson got a lot more of the shape of our current world right than wrong.

But here, I am definitely a fanboy.

It’s been a little over a month since I got my iPod Touch. Here are a couple of observations to supplement my ranting about the quality of the music player.

App Store Surprisingly, I’m not finding a whole of useful stuff in the App Store. I’m really not much into gaming which seems to be a category that dominates the ratings. Right now the only app type that I’m thinking of picking up is some kind of task or productivity manager. I grabbed Evernote and Instapaper, yet still haven’t put them to any use.

e-books The one sample chapter of Neuromancer that I read using iBooks was actually quite pleasant. Amazon’s Kindle app for the iPhone is up next. I’m going to use it to read Charles Stross’ free novellette Overtime. I could get to like this e-book thing. Hopefully publishers will get the pricing straightened out. I can’t remember the title, but they were asking $11.99 for an e-book edition when I could have bought the paperback for $9.99.

Social Media I enjoy social media browsing and light feed reading much more on the touch. Browsing Twitter and Facebook one handed, leaning back, with my feet up, just feels more natural and appropriate. Flicking through some low intensity feeds with NetNewsWire is a breeze. In general, the Touch is really good at filling interstitial spaces.

Podcasting Video podcasts? Other than The Economist video segments (quite nicely done despite the loud Lotus intros), I’ve been pretty disappointed. Might as well be extended radio segments. This Week in Google is surprisingly weak given the pedigree. It’s an hour of unorganized chit-chat which tends to be pretty close to content free. They really need a good radio producer to give the show some structure and focus.

The new iPhone 4 induced a little bit of feature envy, but I’m still pretty happy with the Touch. Not having readily available 3G definitely does have an impact though. The device feels totally different when it has no connectivity.

Since I’ve slimmed down my media criticism diet, I may have missed it, but ESPN deserves some credit for its World Cup 2010 coverage, especially on TV. Even though we haven’t hit the finals, I have a whole bunch of positive elements:

• First and foremost, all games are being broadcast live. Not all the pool games were on TV, but at least you could stream them from the net. Insert withering sideways glance at NBC here.

• Many exciting or crucial games were also televised on tape delay, mostly whole, on the same day.

• The United States was highly and properly promoted, without studio hosts falling into jingoism. This particularly applies to Alexi Lalas who, while sympathetic to the US side for obvious reasons, still provided great level-headed analysis.

• The selection of European play-by-play and color broadcasters was perfectly appropriate. Typical dumbass US sportscasting policy would have called for a three man booth, featuring a network golden boy and two long forgotten NASL players.

• Judicious use of technology to highlight important football elements, e.g. offsides, but no gimmicks.

• The I Scored A Goal series was a nice promotional run up. And they actually promoted the World Cup coverage well before it started. I knew exactly where to go when play started.

• They brought out the big guns, Bob Ley, Chris Fowler, Reese Davis, etc. as studio hosts on site. Considering ESPN is also covering Wimbledon, and just came off of the US Open and the NBA Finals, this was a pretty impressive investment. Plus, no Chris “Boomer” Berman in sight.

All in all, ESPN basically took The World Cup 2010 as a serious, international, big-time event. Which of course it is but since the US traditionally hasn’t been a top level side, there’s a temptation to tart up the proceedings. ESPN didn’t half-ass it, or treat it like a novelty. The National Hockey League wishes it could get coverage this good.

My only minor complaint, and it’s exceedingly minor, is that a little bit of local color and backstory would have been nice. I don’t need a ton of soft pre-canned goop like NBC does for the Olympics , but a few more player, team, and/or historical tournament profiles would have been the cherry on top. Also, just a little more on the impact of the tournament on the streets of South Africa would have been great. Then again, maybe they’re just squashing bad news. At least they didn’t dwell on the vuvuzelas.

But again Bravo ESPN!! from this very casual follower of The Beautiful Game.

Interesting. Virgin Mobile is about to sell a 3G MiFi Hotspot. Big deal you say? Just like Verizon, AT&T and Sprint, whoopedo! First up, no long term contract after you buy the device for $150. Second, it looks like you’ll be able to purchase megabytes using pre-paid cards.

I’ve been thinking that one of the major hang-ups I have with the HTC Evo is the extra $30 a month for WiFi hotspotting. But really, how badly do I need that feature? The Virgin Mobile offering is a reasonable compromise for someone like me where usage is probably mostly bursty, especially relative to the Clear 4G+, which carries a $40 per month post-paid fee.

After thoroughly enjoying Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, I parked his RocknRolla on the DVR. Took me a while to get around to watching the movie, which was definitely a mistake. RocknRolla is a pretty damn good flick.

RocknRolla follows the Ritchie standard playbook incorporating multiple threads of somewhat bumbling London gangsters to both comic and action packed effect. The trigger point is a mega-stadium being built by a Russian billionaire, Uri Omovich. Omovich needs certain construction permits “taken care of quickly” and turns to long-standing English crime kingpin Lenny Cole to make it happen. Uri also lends Cole his lucky painting, which immediately gets nicked.

Of course mayhem and hilarity promptly ensue. I shouldn’t oversell Lenny and Uri as the movie really revolves around One Two, Mumbles, and Handsome Rob, key members of The Wild Bunch crew. RocknRolla is a little less frenetic and kinetic than Snatch, but it still moves. Plus it’s damn funny. RocknRolla is really a comedy caper at heart, with a nice dose of action.

Herewith some highlights:

• A great cast including: Gerard Butler, Tom Wilkinson, Idris Elba, Jeremy Piven, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Karel Roden, and Toby Kebbell as Johnny Quid

• Great hood names such as, One Two (Butler), Mumbles (Elba), and Handsome Rob

• Some great teasin’ and chappin’ amongst The Wild Bunch

• Archy’s manner which is , well…, rather arch in an exceedingly dry style

• Thandie Newton, as Stella, and Gemma Arterton, as June, are easy on the eyes

• A hilarious dance sequence between Stella and One Two

• The junky philosophical stylings of Johnny Quid and his sidekick, Pedro

• And a great MacGuffin

The tail end of the movie teased a sequel called “The Real RocknRolla”. Looking forward to it.

Knocked off Michael Moorcok’s Elric of Melnibone this week. An old, dusty box at my mother’s house held the entire seven DAW editions of Moorcock’s albino anti-hero, Elric. Elric is right up there with Conan as an iconic swords and sorcery character. I remember that as a teen, Elric’s tales felt somewhat more sophisticated for fantasy, probably due to a darker themes and a British author.

Elric of Melnibone is mostly about introducing characters and setting the stage. Elric is a quite discomfited emperor, showing empathetic capacity not in line with his cruel forbears. There’s a lot of probing of his and his cohort’s internal feelings about each and other and the world. Elric could easily be read as a metaphorical tale of a fading empire’s struggles.

While the characters are rich and distinctive, the actual plot and writing are nondescript. The book comes in at a thin 160 pages, and even at that I felt like it dragged in a few places. A lot of the base constructs (moody anti-hero, dark and treacherous gods, fading exotic empire) are well crafted, but the actual action is mundane. Eventually we’re reduced to a less than thrilling chase involving Elric trying to reach the evil black sword Stormbringer before his rivalrous cousin Yyrkoon. At the denouement, nothing is resolved and Elric sets out on a ridiculously foolish journey.

Still Elric of Melnibone is worth reading as a darker counterpoint to stuff like The Lord of the Rings. And if you’re even a middling fan of fantasy, you need to know what all the fuss is about.

I have to say though, the DAW cover just does not fit the character. Elric and bulging muscles are not synonymous in my mind.

Your right to comment ends at my front door.

I was never wavering on my aversion to comments on this site. Just in case though, it’s good to know that Derek Powazek and John Gruber are of a similar mind to me when it comes to not employing them.

As a card carrying member of late 80’s, early 90’s hip-hop fandom, I’m sort of torn by Kia’s latest hamster commercial. On the one hand, it’s a pretty well done homage to Black Sheep’s The Choice is Yours.

On the other hand, it’s freekin’ hamsters.

And of course the original video is still a classic. I’m surprised Kia didn’t make more of a connection, especially with Dres and Mr. Lawnge reaching into and crumpling up the screen.

In a previous life, I was early on the bandwagon of prefuse, an innovative information visualization toolkit implemented in Java. A key element was the programming model that systematically organized the transformation of data into graphical elements. Subsequent work identified and extracted information visualization design patterns, including the usage of structured tables and SQL-like query facilities.

While it would be hard to top the quality of prefuse as a Java toolkit, I’ve always wondered what a Python adaptation would look like. The graphic primitives aren’t that big a deal, and Python is rich enough to easily emulate any of prefuse’s control flow mechanisms. The structured tables and SQL facilities always bugged me though, because it seemed to me that you could easily use an embedded relational engine, like SQLite, to support those capabilities. The embedded DB could provide a richer query language than prefuse’s, higher performance querying, and persistent storage allowing you to work with bigger datasets.

I’ve been mentally kicking this issue around and digging into the prefuse source code to see what exactly was implemented. I think I’ve got a relatively straightforward way to emulate prefuse’s table facilities in a stock Python install. This is starting to feel like a worthy side project.

The result wouldn’t be completely superfluous as I think there are some unexplored issues in terms of the prefuse model and interaction. Also, the combo with Python might lead to some increased flexibility due to the language change, and a higher level of accessibility due to an interactive command loop and Python’s batteries included. Of course you’d lose the ability to generate applets, but frankly that’s probably a small loss.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Ars Technica’s review of iOS4. There’s deep into the features and then there’s an ArsTechnica obsessive compulsive disorder level of inspection. They even dig out the dirty little warts of all these new features.

P.S. They also confirm that the iPod music app, it can’t even be graced with the iTunes name, is standing still:

Within the iPod app itself, barely anything has changed except for the ability to create and edit playlists. In fact, even this isn’t very new: Apple has basically revamped what was previously known as “on-the-go playlists,” which was an old concept anyway that was carried over from the days when iPods didn’t have touchscreens. Now, under the (mostly just renamed) system, there’s a menu item to “Add Playlist” toward the top of your playlist list:

C’mon Apple. This is beneath your standards.

Since I have an iPod Touch of recent vintage, I’m privy to the latest and greatest iPhone operating system, iOS 4. I joined the rush and updated my iPod today. Gizmodo (yeah I know, they’re probably on the wrong side of that “lost” iPod issue) seems to have a pretty good breakdown of the new features, going deep into the main feature list, and then even deeper into some “hidden” features. Many of the new features are obviously iPhone 4 related, but there are a couple that are of interest to me.

The biggest one is iBooks. I doubt that I’ll be reading a ton of books on the iPod but I’m going to give it a test drive. There seems to be a fair amount of free material and each book seems to have a sample. I’ve already grabbed Charles Stross’ Overtime, a Laundry short story, as a freebie, and a sample chapter from William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

I have to admit, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” looks pretty good, even on such a tiny screen.

Meanwhile, looks like iTunes is still teh suck. Oh, now you can edit playlists on the Touch, even if you can’t read the long titles. Sigh!

Took the day off. Put the feet up, watched some football, some golf, and then had a nice dinner out with the wife and my little guy (3+ years old). Hope every other guy doing their best to provide proper guidance for youth had as good a day. Cheers!!

Just finished Charles Stross’ Iron Sunrise this past week. I had made a good start, got sidetracked, then jumped back in thanks to a long plane trip. Like many of Stross’ works I got a little lost in the baroque ornamentation of singularity science. But I still enjoyed this story, quite like I did the first in this series Singularity Sky.

While the protagonist of Singularity Sky, Rachel Mansour, has a significant role in this tale of interplanetary intrigue, she by no means hogs the spotlight. Instead, Wednesday Strowger, a teenager on the lam after her home planet has been wiped out, twice, is arguably the heroine. Both of them are trying to defeat a dark, planet destroying plot, although it’s not until the latter third of the book that they connect.

Iron Sunrise is more overtly political than Singularity Sky, while the later is a bit more humorous: “Will you entertain us?”. The ReMastered, the bad guys of the novel, are bit of a Nazi pastiche and laid on a little thick, but still quite ominous. Stross pulls a nice ethical twist with them at the climax of the novel. There’s also a host of other interesting characters fleshed out to varying levels of detail.

I’m not going to claim Iron Sunrise blew me away, but it was a solid sci-fi read, and a little more accessible than the typical Stross singularity mindfuck. Worth springing for the paperback edition.

Whenever you hold the device in a landscape position, you get CoverFlow. There’s no setting to disable this.

You can’t start a playlist by double tapping on the playlist name.

Guess what, you can’t shuffle by album, which you can do on an iPod Nano.

Still extremely chapped about not scrolling long titles.

And I hate apps that pop out to Safari to display a URL. Problem is you can’t easily pop back into the original app. Just embed WebKit, like NetNewsWire does.

This is mostly about the poor interface in iTunes music playback. I’ve noticed that you really don’t have a cursor which may be part of the problem. The scrolling is BS though. ESPN has a horizontal crawl in its apps. Why can’t Apple get this one little detail correct.

Also, you’ve got this big display area and metadata on each track, but all those beautiful pixels aren’t being put to any use.

The upcoming NBA Finals is intriguing though, with a Celtics-Laker rematch of the 2008 Finals. Despite having home-court advantage and Kobe Bryant, it’s unclear who is the favorite in this series. While seemingly challenged in the Western Conference, the Lakers haven’t gone more than 6 games this year. It also feels like they have a bit more talent than the Celtics. Meanwhile, the Celtics have been on a roll and their defense has rounded back into 2008 form.

I’ll take the Lakers winning it in a close game 7, although I’m a little nervous going against Tim Legler, who has the Celtics in 6. He’s been on target with his predictions much of the postseason.

The Lakers are the 2009-10 NBA Champions. Game 7 was a grinder affair, but pretty tense. Still doesn’t make up for the tepidness of the rest of the playoffs. Heck, I didn’t even find any of The Finals games particularly dramatic. Contrast with Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals.

ABC/ESPN what’s up with having Magic in the booth, then going all Laker fanboy on the podium? Un-pro-fessional. Hey LA, I don’t care who you’re a fan of, you don’t boo Bill Russell. ABC had to lay on the 7 second delay tonight didn’t they?

And Ron Ron Artest has a ring. Long way from the Malice in the Palace. He still crazy though.

For a moment, David Pogue’s review of the HTC Evo had put the dagger in my choice of the new 4G phone, battery life being the culprit again. Here’s the money quote:

The good news is that most of the disappointing, flaky and mediocre aspects of the Evo all pertain to its cutting-edge features. Thousands of people don’t actually care about 4G or hot spots or video calling. They take pleasure in the Evo’s less exotic features: sizzling speed, smooth software, ingenious layout of the five home screens, and even the little kickstand that props the thing up when you’re watching a video.

Beyond that, the Evo is basically a technology demo. It’s a glimpse at the high-speed, smooth-video future of this country’s cell systems, at least for people who live in those 32 lucky hamlets.

Some of the Evo fans descended on the comments with contradicting experiences. Apparently if you work a little you can easily decrease the power consumption.

The real killer may be the monthly charges that accrue if you want the Evo with all the bells and whistles. You’re looking at $70 for the plan Sprint forces on you, plus $10 for the privilege of 4G (even if you’re not covered), plus $30 for WiFi hotspotting. That’s $110 a month total.

But here’s a combination of an iPhone 4 and a modem from Clearwire:

• $40 AT&T Nation 450 (voice)

• $5 AT&T Messaging 200 (text)

• $25 AT&T DataPro plan (data)

• $40 4G/3G unlimited Clear data plan

So for the same $110 bucks, I get the identical coverage on my laptop, which I can use as a WiFi hotspot through MacOS X Internet sharing, and an arguably better phone. Or at least one with less hassle. And I could ease into this plan, test driving the iPhone 4 with tethering before committing to Clear.

Now that’s not a complete apples to apples comparison, since the data plan for the phone is unlimited, text and bytes, with Sprint, while with AT&T I’m capped at 200 texts and 2GB of data. There’s also the $115 for the Clear modem and the inconvenience of another device. Alternatively, I could forgo the Clear 4G plan, add tethering to the AT&T plan and get a monthly hit of $90.

I still haven’t run into a review that flat out says “the Evo is great” with no qualms. Maybe I should trawl the Android fan sites to get another perspective.

It’s about two weeks since I discovered SportsGrid, but I’m really enjoying their reportage. I especially liked their NCAA football coverage while the Big 12 was melting dow … errr … reconfiguring. Again, I have to point out SportsGrid, while having a slightly irreverent tone, is simply not as juvenile as DeadSpin. The only irritant is their usage of “WATCH” in every post that features a video embed.

Highly recommended.

Matt Neuburg knows a bit about Apple in general and Macintosh technology in particular. He’s a Witch fan, so I’m in good company. If you’re a Macintosh user, you should buy a copy right this minute ;-) I’ve even put my own money where my mouth is and paid for a license.

At TidBITS, Neuburg outlines why he loves the window switching application. The new release improves performance and works better with Spaces. I even learned quite a bit about some advanced Witch features.

Just doin’ my bit to promote the independent developer economy.

Update: Corrected egregious typo of Neuburg

In the spirit of Jeff Atwood’s Meta is Murder, I’ve generally been avoiding meta-blogging here. Not that I’m generating a stream of the most deepest, insightful posts, but hey it’s my site.

However, allow an indulgence.

Recently I hit a couple of century marks in my posting. First, in March, April, and May of 2010, I posted a total of 100 times. That beats my previous best three month total of 96 from September, August, and July of 2009.

Second, I’m currently on a streak of 107 straight days of posting. I hit 100 straight on June 6th and have been trucking along ever since. There have been a couple of close calls and challenges, mostly related to long days at work, late night post-work social functions, and long distance work related travel. Did I thoroughly blame work? Posting desperation only really crept in one time, but I beat midnight with five minutes or so to spare. And only one post felt like it was mailed in. Otherwise, I’ve felt like I’ve made a good honest effort to provide some value or entertainment with a basis in the myriad of things that I’m working on or interest me on a daily basis. I’ll probably take a break soon though.

One thing the streak has done is bring some clarity to this blog’s themes. Clearly, I’m not close to what I long ago wrote in the About page. The #1 topic has to be a trailing edge geek’s quest for a new smartphone. Then it’s equal parts, post-disco dance/electronic music, Apple nuggets, sports observations, and a skoosh of science fiction. Mmmmm, fantasy football’s only 3 months away!

Some stuff I need to get back to? Working on a sideline programming project. Reading more books. And expanding my library of DnB mixes.

No plans to do comments, as I still can’t stand them. But Annals of the Disco Diaspora might get some more play. I’m having fun digging into my mental history of 80’s and 90’s dance music.

To infinity and beyond!

I’ve been a long time ssh user, but not with much sophistication. Caught a nice little tip on Lifehacker about setting up per host ssh config files. The key thing for me was being able to customize each configuration, give it a name, and have ssh tab complete named configurations. I’ll have to give this a try toot de suite.