So I now have in my hot little hands a copy of William Gibson’s just released book Zero History

Although not the greatest video, here’s a taste of what Zero History is about:

I’ve said before that I’m in the tank for Gibson. Right now he’s the only author I pick up in hardback (modulo Chaykin of course, but that’s a special circumstance). This may be the last hardcover I buy ever. One, while I like the Pattern Recognition series, I don’t like near future style enough to keep purchasing hardbacks. If Gibson keeps up in this vein, I’ll probably start waiting for the paperback editions.

And two, by the time he completes his next book I’ll probably be well into e-books.

Speaking of Pattern Recognition, I haven’t read it in a while. Spook Country came out over three years ago. So I think I’ll read the whole set as a trilogy to get the full thematic impact.

Moved publishing of this weblog over to Movable Type 5. Things look mostly unbroken. Spooged the Atom feed for a few minutes, thanks to a setting buried away in the user profile that the Atom template slurps up. Need to crawl over the archives and see if anything else has busted.

Update. Whoopsie. Forgot to move the actual MT cgi files over. Breakage may still ensue.

Update 2. Think I’ve got it all sorted, but anticipate further bumps.

Harder than I think it should have been, but not as bad as my worst imaginings, I’ve managed to upgrade Mass Programming Resistance to the latest version of Movable Type. Here’s the high level steps to the migration:

• Export the 4.23 content to a basic MovableType xml file.

• Install MovableType 4.34 in a parallel setup. This installation should use MySQL as a database.

• Import the 4.23 content into the 4.34 installation. At this point you have a MySQL db with the 4.007 schema.

• Following Jason Culverhouse’s instructions overwrite all of the MovableType 4.34 CGI files with 5.02 files.

• Use perl ./tools/upgrade --name superuser from the cgi directory to upgrade the db to the 5.0x schema.

At this point, seems like I’m in good shape. There are some configuration settings that need to be tweaked, and I need to port the handful of MT pages over, but otherwise all seems good. Even posting using MarsEdit seems to work. In fact, the new install seems make posting with MarsEdit speedier.

No thanks to the Movable Type documentation, which I found to be pretty much useless on the topic of upgrading.

Still need to do the actual switch over, but should be about a 5 minute job. Apologies if screws up your feed reader.

Well, I was planning on upgrading my blog to MovableType 5, but they dumped support for SQLite, which was one of my favorite features. Now the default only supports MySQL. If I have to go that route, I’ll have to seriously evaluate what blog platform I use. Drag!

Also, this is a test post for MarsEdit 3.

Foo. Doesn’t seem to have fixed long posting times. I suspect it’s not MarsEdit’s fault, but my server side setup.

Took me a little over a week from reception to completion of Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!. Definitely well worth the $$ I laid out for it. 20+ years on while I can see some of the shallowness induced by the form, I can better appreciate the underlying satire. Chaykin’s art held up really well though. It doesn’t look dated in any way shape or form.

Some elements of the series I had forgotten:

• The rather explicit racial politics, the modern update of the final solution, and the kooky Nazi imagery. The A.S.L.C. were a bunch of bad dudes.

• Mananacillin.

• The Plex trying to literally sell out the United States.

• Reuben’s adventures in Brasilia, and the general rise of South America and Africa.

• Luther Ironheart’s boneheadedness.

• C.K. Blitz, C. G. Marakova, Sam Louis Obispo, Titania Weiss, The Witnesses, and Raul the Cat. How could I forget about Raul!

I can’t remember if Chaykin actually had problems delivering issues on schedule, but a number of the early episodes had a lot of recap. As if there were big chronological gaps in when the issues were actually published. Another minor nit is that the hardcover edition doesn’t have any page numbers, especially when it comes in at a big honking 400+ pages.

In any event, issues 1-12 were great. The 13th and 14th ones just remind you how great Chaykin’s illustrations were. Here’s hoping that someday there’s a collected release of the second 12 Chaykin issues which includes Northern Lights, Double Cross; Bullets and Ballots; and Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

Over the years, I’ve built a bunch of command line oriented Python scripts. Logging has always been a big tool in the box but I’ve never done as much profiling as I would have liked. So the pyCLI module looks pretty interesting:

The cli package is a framework for making simple, correct command line applications in Python. With cli, you can quickly add standard command line parsing; logging; unit and functional testing; and profiling to your CLI apps. To make it easier to do the right thing, cli wraps all of these tools into a single, consistent application interface.

If it does what it says on the tin, pyCLI can eliminate a lot of boilerplate. I’m also interested in the background of who put the module together and whether it’s been used in a production system. Otherwise, it looks pretty well designed and put together.

After all my whining about Apple’s music player on the iPod Touch, I thought I’d dig around and see if there were any alternatives. I wasn’t holding out much hope, as I thought Apple would have all the iTunes formats and data on lockdown.

Apparently I was wrong. You can write your own custom player for iOS that taps into the users iTunes database. Seems to be a plethora of such apps in the iTunes music store.

So I’m giving the rather garish Amp Music Player a test drive. At the very least, it seems to do a better job of making track metadata visible. But the overly busy interface doesn’t seem quite right coming from the music app. We’ll see how it goes.

After reading Stephen Wolfram’s entry in the setup, I subscribed to the RSS feed. The number of entries went way back. All the way back to Alex Payne, presumably the first entry.

So I decided to read them all.

Don’t know if this is just selection bias, but I noticed there were quite a few Macs in usage, maybe even a significant majority. A lot were laptops with only 4GB of memory. Also enjoyed the gender mix and the eclectic “career” choices.

Some of the more entertaining entries for me included: Amy Hoy, Aaron Swartz, Richard Stallman, Mark Pilgrim, Anne Halsall (reminds me I need to checkout Inkling), and Andrew “bunnie” Huang,

Looks like it’ll be an interesting reading month.

One of the reasons I like reading British sci-fi authors, is that they have enough room in their head for alternative political systems. Witness Iain M. Banks in regards to his Culture series Via MetaFilter:

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces. The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

Despite not really enjoying Banks’ Consider Phlebas, this might be enough encouragement to check out the forthcoming Surface Detail.

In addition, I’ve got William Gibson’s Zero History on pre-order with Amazon. And I’m now reading China Mieville’s The City & The City. Really working the cream of the crop.

I confess to being one of those beta testers that startups hate. One of those that begs for an early invite, then doesn’t use the system, and doesn’t even provide any feedback. In the case of iCurrent, I’m guilty as charged.

I was seduced by Ramana Rao, who’s research, companies, and blog I’ve been following for a long time. The iCurrent vision was definitely simpatico with some thoughts I’ve long had about personalized news. As soon as Rao announced the product, I immediately asked for an invite.

So what caused me to recently turn off my iCurrent e-mail subscription, with a whole bunch of unread messages? The reasons probably start with this quote from Rao:

We spent the first 6 months building a conceptually complete architecture. Not architecture in the sense of a scalable Internet architecture, but as in a framework with places for the ideas. We implemented enough at coarse 90% levels so that we could assess proceeding. Beyond the airflow simulation, it was wind tunnel tests, and then enough of an airplane to test in real world conditions.

Throughout we interviewed people all over the US (Idaho, Kentucky, Ohio, Florida), a typical qualifier being not knowing what “TechCrunch” was.

That should have disqualified me instantly. In addition, I observed the following:

• I read news in my RSS aggregators: Google Reader and NetNewsWire. I don’t want to add any other “locations” such as another website or e-mail.

• Rating is work. I know iCurrent demands people in the loop, but for me I didn’t want to put in the work.

• The channels that seemed closest to my interests weren’t close enough. For example, the house music channel pulled in too many false positives of articles that include the words “house” and “music” or that were simply event announcements.

• The majority of sources were mainstream media, which I’ve mostly given up on for the news I care about.

• Channels only presented small numbers (< 10) of articles. I’m just wired for much higher rates of information flow.

I wish iCurrent the best of luck. If they can pull off aggregation for the average non-techie it’ll be a big winner. I remember Daylife trying to hoe this row and changing course to become a smart content provider for publishers. If there’s one suggestion I had for iCurrent, it might be to provide an API to allow others to experiment with human in the loop in those places they can’t service, like feed readers.

Flash Update. Turns out iCurrent was purchased by the Washington Post Company back in July. If MediaBeat is right, and the purchase price was in the neighborhood of $5 million, that’s not encouraging for personalized news as a business. iCurrent’s only investor, Crosslink Capital, put in $3 million over about 3 years. That’s probably not an acceptable rate of return for a venture capital firm.

And I don’t have a lot of confidence that WaPo can make something significant out of the acquisition. Besides, iCurrent limited to one source doesn’t seem all that useful.

It’s a little over a week until the start of the National Football League regular season. All across the land, fantasy football league drafts are taking place.

I know you don’t care about my fantasy team. I wanted to alert the audience to the fact that I will be guiding a new edition of Doom Patrol in defense of my office league title. I was getting a little nervous there, but the commish finally pulled the trigger on the league invites. Unfortunately it’s short suspense, as our draft is this Friday evening.

There will be chronicling.

You have been warned.

Despite my disappointment with Douglas Rushkoff’s Life, Inc., and a wariness of books taglined with listicle bait (TEN COMMANDS FOR A DIGITAL AGE), I’m somewhat intrigued by Rushkoff’s new book, Program or be Programmed.

In this spirited, accessible poetics of new media, Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off, helping readers come to recognize programming as the new literacy of the digital age––and as a template through which to see beyond social conventions and power structures that have vexed us for centuries. This is a friendly little book with a big and actionable message.

I’m generally aligned with the sentiments expressed in his recent blog posts, wary of corporatism and mass culture, and interested to see Rushkoff’s prescription. Presumably he’ll spend less time building the argument and more on actionable measures.

I’m also interested to see how his experiment with indie publishing works out.

15 years ago to the day, a secretive site called Suck, launched its first salvo onto the Web. Within a couple of weeks, if not a few days, I discovered the site and was instantly hooked.

While obviously of its time that first post, Live Through This, still reads pretty caustic and pretty funny. A tirade about Courtney Love conspiracy theories, it marked to my mind the beginning of the modern blogosphere. To that point, what resembled blogging was mostly tech oriented, personality driven, or link blogging. Blogging was still all about the Internet and the Web. Suck transcended the form by using the blog format as a mode of serious media criticism, including critique of The Web (tm). Interestingly the only URL in that post that’s survived link rot is Lollapalooza’s. And of course the permalink for Live Through This.

A couple of alums also managed to survive and thrive a bit as well. Ana Marie Cox went on to fame as a Wonkette. Heather Havrilesky does a lot of work for Salon. If you read anything intelligent, you’ve probably run across Terry Colon’s illustrations. I wonder if Jake Tapper ever regrets contributing as James Bong.

Suck’s been gone for over 9 years. I still pour out some chardonnay for ya homie.

Information informs. Analysis enlightens.

Classic Institute.

According to Wired, Dr. Who might have paid a visit to MIT’s 6.01. As a 6-3 alum, I have to quibble with Annalee Newitz’s “the infamously hard and awesome introduction to computer science class.” Awesome? Yes! Infamously hard? No. Famously well taught, so that many folks from other majors would take it? Definitely.

Update: Better story via MIT itself. The Doctor: 1 / Harvard: 0.

Photo courtesy of Melanie McCue through a Creative Commons by-nc-nd license.

So I hit some pretty important milestones at work and decided to give myself a summer treat. I ordered the hardcover collection Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! from Amazon. A little over a year ago, this edition hit my radar, but I hadn’t gotten around to purchasing a copy. Partially because of the price, which was $50 from the only place I could find it online, at the time.

Well Amazon had it for $37. Since I’m an Amazon Prime member, I got it in two days for no extra charge. What’s not to like?

The book arrived just a little while ago. And boy does Chaykin’s art still look good, even 27 years later. Definitely amped up to revisit Reuben Flagg’s (mis)adventures again.

Firefight! All Night! Live!

Finished off the first book, Conan, in what I’d call the definitive paperback series for Conan the Barbarian. Here’s the contents:

• Introduction (L. Sprague de Camp)

• Letter from Robert E. Howard to P. Schuyler Miller (Robert E. Howard)

• The Hyborian Age, Part 1 (Robert E. Howard)

• The Thing in the Crypt (L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter)

• The Tower of the Elephant (Robert E. Howard)

• The Hall of the Dead (Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp)

• The God in the Bowl (Robert E. Howard)

• Rogues in the House (Robert E. Howard)

• The Hand of Nergal (Robert E. Howard and Lin Carter)

• The City of Skulls (L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter)

I cheated a little in that I didn’t bother to read the Introduction, Letter from Robert E. Howard to P. Schuyler Miller, and The Hyborian Age, Part 1. Sorry if I remember the material wrong, but I wasn’t interested in reading extensive world building and fanboyish claptrap.

In this series of stories, Conan is pretty young, basically a teenager. He wanders away from Cimmeria into the more “civilized” western nations of the area. Most of his initial adventures are as a thief, but by the end of the book he’s become a trained mercenary. Interestingly in the first two-thirds of the book, the stories read with much more of a mystery feel than swords and sorcery.

As one can see, this is again a mix of Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. The straight Howard stuff is pure gold. The Tower of the Elephant, The God in the Bowl, and Rogues in the House are all well paced and written, if occasionally a bit flowery, reflecting the pulp heritage of the era. Special nod to Rogues in the House for inspiring the classic cover art by Frank Frazetta. Carter didn’t do too bad a job finishing up The Hand of Nergal. The other three stories are pretty pedestrian. At the moment, I can’t even remember the plot of The Hall of the Dead.

And just an observation, but I’m pretty sure every story up until The City of Skulls featured some form of the phrase, “Conan, naked but for a loincloth…” C’mon guys, break out a thesaurus once in a while.

Virgin’s gone nuts! Now they’re offering unlimited mobile broadband through their Mi-Fi device for $40 a month. There’s no contract required and pay as you go. Nice!

Of course unlimited probably means “not too much over 5GB please or we’ll shut you down.” But still it’s a savory pricepoint. $40 is south of what AT&T charges you for tethering on their data plans. So you can get the upside of Wi-Fi sharing for multiple devices at a lower cost. And relative to tethering the Mi-Fi is probably no more inconvenient.

Via Glenn Fleishman at TidBITS

Okay, so that DJ Pierre mix (Parts 1 and 2) that I spotted on the Toronto Mixtape Archive was surprisingly poor. Pierre never hit a memorable groove, a couple of times it seemed someone bumped the tables, and worse there were a few beat matching train-wrecks. That being said, his mix incorporated a few high quality tracks that I hadn’t heard in a long time. One was What is House Muzik?, a DJ Pierre classic.

Another was Green Velvet’s The Preacher Man off of the Velvet Tracks EP. At the time The Preacher Man was startling in that Curtis A. Jones basically ripped of some (probably South Side Chicago) preacher’s sermon and threw it over really hardcore pounding Acid beats and tweaks. And still the most popular game we play…is house!. Whatever, it worked. You can still throw that in a mix today, 16 years after its release, and get people on the floor to scream.

I’m holding on to the somewhat rare transparent green vinyl 12” edition, keeping it in storage. And I’ve got memories of hitting the SF club scene with Cajmere in the early 90’s. We were both grad students at Cal Berkeley and into the burgeoning San Francisco House/Techno scene of the time. He was in Chemical Engineering and bailed out after his master’s to pursue a music career. Turns out to have been a pretty good choice.

Link parkin’: The history of Strictly Rhythm, the iconic house music label. First I’ve seen of how Mark Finkelstein and Gladys Pizzaro came together. Also establishes some official years. Still leaves quite a bit unsaid about the rift and legal issues with Warner Bros. But new info for me nonetheless.

I am utterly embarrassed to admit this, but here goes. Just this past week I learned something really amazing about my MacBook, even though it’s clearly right there in the machine specs.

My little laptop supports two finger scrolling on the trackpad.

Woohoo!!

While this feature is overall great for browsing the Web, it really obviates some complaints I had about NetNewsWire. Now I can easily scroll through the headlines in a folder without opening all of them. And I can easily switch between scrolling the headlines and scrolling an item body.

Manna!!

Yes, I am easily amused.

One of the neat things about Twitter is there seems to be a decent contingent of DJs tweeting, including Mark Farina and DJ Heather. Often they tweet links to appearance announcements, new releases, and interesting older material.

Thanks to a DJ Heather tweet, I found out about the Toronto Rave Mixtape Archive. Within that site there’s a large collection of house music mixes from the mid-90’s. Names of interest include Pierre, Derrick Carter, Juan Atkins, DJ Dan, Doc Martin, and Bad Boy Bill.

Frantically downloading.

I’m with Garret Vreeland on this one. If you were an adult of a certain persuasion during the Reagan presidency, the actual experience didn’t live up to the subsequent mythology:

Emblematic, however, of why we called him “Bonzo.” King of tall tales and never a connection to reality … which, if you recall history at all … the Reagan Administration is when Presidential press conferences became rare occurrences.

When I used to teach Python, I would always get on students to use Python’s built-in optparse module when writing scripts. For whatever NIH reason, people wanted to do a half-ass job of groveling over sys.argv instead of using a module specifically designed to alleviate the pain.

Things on the command line parsing front have been advancing lately. To wit, the new argparse module:

The argparse module was added to Python 2.7 as a replacement for optparse. The implementation of argparse supports features that would not have been easy to add to optparse, and that would have required backwards-incompatible API changes, so a new module was brought into the library instead. optparse is still supported, but is not likely to receive new features.

This makes a must read out of Doug Hellmann’s Python Module of the Week (PyMOTW) entry for argparse to get a good basic understanding of the module.

High end toolmakers are major force multipliers in military speak.

A wayward new media hack once wrote that sentence, describing Googler Rob Pike’s systems tools.

So I enjoyed this article where Pike discusses some of the motivations behind the design of the Go programming language. Key takeaways for me were:

• Diversity of expert language design opinion

• A Schemely emphasis on collecting orthogonal features and allowing for powerful composition

• A radical focus on reducing compilation time

So I’ve failed miserably at on old goal to learn the Clojure programming language. Since Pike claims that some Pythonistas find Go quite palatable, maybe I should give Go a shot.

Looks like Verizon is upgrading its settop boxes, especially the channel guide. Glad to see Engadget also had some issues with the current boxes, although they liked it overall.

I’ve lodged my complaints before. Just wondering if the changes will show up before I kick FiOS TV to the curb.

Somewhat dusty, but new to me. How Guido von Rossum, Python’s Benevolent Dictator for Life, writes main() functions. GvR discusses how to neatly and flexibly handle argv, exit codes, and usage errors. The discussion is worth reading as well.

Via Metalinguistic Abstraction

I know everyone else is pointing to Stephen Wolfram’s the setup entry, but it’s sort of cool to see the tech one of the world’s smartest people uses on a daily basis. The only surprising thing is the general “off-the-shelfness” of Wolfram’s tools. Obviously Mathematica had to be #1 on the list, although I’m sure it’s completely kitted out with extensions, tweaks, and alpha features. Other than that, nothing really surprising or extravagant.

Except maybe for the telepresence robot.

I recently discovered dopeden’s Decks By the Beach podcast. Basically it’s a feed of DJ mixes. I downloaded all that I can find and have been enjoying most of them. Can’t complain about the price.

Listening to Dave Bullock’s mix on my iPod Touch, I was surprised to notice the ability to fast forward within the mix. There was also cover art, albeit quite grainy, for each stop. Neat.

Turns out the MPEG-4 file format, which Apple uses with the AAC audio encoding, supports chapter markers. Since the format is locked up in the ISO MPEG-4 standard, which you have to pay money for, the best info I could find about this feature was a tutorial on how to add them to an audio file using Apple’s GarageBand.

One of my major nits with DJ mixes on the Web is that you get them in one unnavigable wad of MP3 bits. Glad to know there’s at least one standard way of cleaning up this shortcoming. Too bad it’s not ridiculously convenient for DJs to capture their mixes this way.

… showed up in my Mac OS X.

Or at least a great plug did from Rick Yaeger of MacMerc.com for Algoriddim’s DJay software.

With a decent chunk of the Strictly Rhythm catalog now being offered digitally by Defected, might have to purchase a copy of DJay and give it a try.

Link parkin’: Git for the lazy. A sweet and quick introduction to the highly popular version control program git. Jibes with my experience learning how to use git. However it does highlight one inconsistency that mildly bugs me: the difference between git reset and git checkout for reversing edits.

I’m sure someone’s proposed some kind of aliasing of git checkout to a reset.

And I’m sure there’s either some reason I’ve never heard of it, or it doesn’t exist. That’s the UNIX way.

Just snagged a neato tip from the Finer Things in Mac blog. LaunchBar is a smart and convenient way to add items to iCal calendars. I’m starting to use iCal more as I use my iPod touch more, so this is good to know.

Clearly, AT & T bashing is the order of the day, at least for iPhone fanatics. But I’m not here to bury Ma Bell, but to praise her.

The wife’s been agitating for a new phone. She’d basically worn out a low end Nokia and was simply looking for something equivalent.

Meanwhile, the both of us were well past our upgrade deadlines. We were on separate individual plans and both of us were wildly underutilizing our minute allocations. So we stopped by the local AT & T store and looked into a Family Plan.

Previously, I had called to ask about this, and it sounded like a nightmare. In particular, I was told we’d have to upgrade both phones at the same time. Maybe it was the fact that we were in an AT & T corporate storefront, but the process was exceedingly painless. Some major corporate discounts and fee eliminations from my employer probably helped. My wife got the phone she was looking for, a Nokia 2330, plus we cut our combined monthly bill down by 50%. The only downer is we lost all our rollover minutes. Then again they were expiring at the rate of 400 a month, so it’s not like we were actually using them. Took us about 30 minutes total to conduct the transaction.

And I didn’t have to upgrade my phone, while maintaining my upgrade eligibility. So once I put a little cash aside, I can walk in and buy a fully subsidized app phone. Maybe that’s when I’ll find out the hard way about the downside of AT & T.

In the meantime, props to AT & T for excellent customer service.

This past week marked the anniversaries of starting this blog and getting the MacBook I’m writing this post on.

Unlike the last anniversary, I don’t have much to say this time around. I’ve been on a nice continuous posting roll that I’m quite happy with. It’d be nice to post more about tech, but the current mix is fulfilling.

Probably the most surprising thing is how well the MacBook has held up. It’s pretty close to three generations old at this point and was bottom of the line for its time. Other than the bus speed, 3x now, and the graphics chip, NVIDIA instead of Intel, the specs are comparable with what Apple is currently selling.

Despite only having 4Gb of main memory, I comfortably keep 13-16 applications open simultaneously. This includes three browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) holding lots of open tabs. With the continuous subtle improvement of Mac OS X, it feels like the overall experience is getting better. The machine rarely feels slow and never crashes.

Conclusions are upcoming. The streak will end in the next few weeks. And there will be a smartphone purchase by the end of September.

Onward and upward!

In preparation for the 2010 World Cup, I started watching some of the Barclay’s Premier League. Unfortunately, it was only the last few weekends of the league. Chelsea had pretty much locked up the title although Manchester United was mildly threatening.

Well, the Premier League’s back. Kick-off for the 2010-11 season is tomorrow. I’m sort of stoked to follow an entire campaign, end-to-end. The tricky bit is choosing a side to root for. ManU would feel a bit like rooting for the New York Yankees and Chelsea would just be front running. Sort of tempted to go with The Gunners.

On the ride home from work today, I decided to break out the Masters at Work’s compilation Strictly MAW, and listen to the second mix by Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez. Man, I had forgotten what classics many of the Strictly Rhythm tracks were, including:

• Logic, The Warning. This might have been the first Strictly Rhythm 12” I ever bought. Great flip side too, The Final Frontier.

• Barbara Tucker, I Get Lifted

• Hardrive, Deep Inside. Deep, deep, deep inside. Deep deep down inside.

• Underground Solution, Luv Dancin

• Lil’ Mo Yin Yang, Reach

• The Believers, Who Dares to Believe in Me?. Very underrated. The track that gives and just keeps on giving.

• Erick “More” Morillo, Dancin

• Aly-Us, Follow Me. Although I can’t stand this song. I don’t need any shower singing in my mix.

Glad to see the label is back in business.

Finished Greg Egan’s 1994 novel Permutation City. Egan retains the title as the singularly most challenging science fiction writer I have ever read in my life. Granted, I’m not a sci-fi completist but I find it hard to believe that there are more than one or two other hard sf writers who are in his class. Egan’s work is not easy reading, but it’s definitely worth the effort.

The Wikipedia page for Permutation City is actually a pretty good summary despite a few Wikiwarts. The essence of the book is a deep exploration of the consequences of viable computational simulation of human consciousness. Many other Singularity or “nerd rapture” books have this aspect as a feature, but they often have as a bug an implicit assumption that humans can straightforwardly make the transition to such an existence. Egan doesn’t take this easy path.

The Wikipedia entry lingers a little too long on the geeky computing aspects of the story, but the real reward is the varied characters who make the ultimate transition into a simulated “immortality”. And their varied human reactions. There’s the reluctant creator of both the simulated Elysium and a computational alien world within it. There’s the pair of stowaway lovers who get immortality but can’t join the society on which they’re essentially parasites. There’s the privileged asshole who carries a guilty secret into an infinite life, and winds up descending into a self-made hell.

When you get down to it, Egan does a deep dive into the philosophical question of if you can simulate consciousness into infinity, what does it actually mean to be human anymore?

P.S. The chapter titles are cute, and I’m sure there’s an Easter Egg or two beyond the play on the title.

P.P.S. If you’re looking for a taste of how hard Egan’s work can be, check out the FAQ for Permutation City

Apparently I was behind an update to Witch. I know I’ve previously plugged this window switching tool for the Macintosh, but it’s worth repeating. Witch is a nearly indispensable tool.

In the latest version Pop-up Previews, as seen above, are pretty cool.

The recent upgrade of Thunderbird busted my installation of Nostalgy. Thankfully the developer release is compatible with the latest version of Thunderbird. This just served to remind me of the amazing utility of keyboard based functionality. Nostalgy enables the ability to copy or move e-mails to folders based upon keystrokes. Between improved search in Thunderbird and Nostalgy, I can power through filing hundreds of e-mails in a short period of time.

Nostalgy is one of two Thunderbird add-ons I have installed. The other is Correct Identity for selecting accounts on outgoing e-mail. I could probably get by without Correct Identity, but I might have to shoot myself if Nostalgy every bites the dust. Heartily recommended.

One of my favorite quips these days is “Rebooting is so last century.” A particular joy of my MacBook is that unintended reboots/crashes have been really infrequent. Granted, I’m not pushing it hard like a real developer, but on the other hand I do a couple of sleeps/suspends a day. I also keep a nice bevy of applications open at all times, including three browsers with plenty of tabs. There’s plenty of room for hard crashes.

As for my ancient Dell laptop for work? Not so much.

Combine the low crash rate with a reasonable OS update frequency and you get the kind of uptimes seen in the screenshot above. 52 days and I could have gone longer if the last.fm scrobbler hadn’t gotten borked by an iTunes update. A voluntary reboot was needed to get things right, along with updating Safari.

This could get real ugly, real fast.

I love Dr. Seuss.

I have an iPod Touch.

I have a 3 year old, fast going on 4.

Oceanhouse Media makes a collection of Dr. Seuss Apps. These are iOS specific renderings of 11 (currently) different Dr. Seuss classics including One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish, Hop on Pop, and The Cat in the Hat. Each book supports natural reader driven navigation, narrated navigation, and auto played. Curious as to how these are different in actual practice.

Unless the apps are totally awful, and the reviews at the iTunes store are pretty good, I could see eventually buying all of the titles. At $3.99 a pop, that ain’t cheap.