Previously, I was skeptical of Ridley Scott directing an adaptation of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. But things might be coming together.

Reported as coming directly from Joe Haldeman himself, Scott teamed up with a script writer he has worked with before, David Peoples. Peoples wrote the screenplay for Unforgiven and Twelve Monkeys. Oh and that iconic Blade Runner flick.

Upon further review though, Peoples has moved on from the writing project. The screenplay is now in the hands of Matthew Michael Carnahan. Nothing particularly outstanding on his short resume, but no particular dogs either.

The movie could still end up in development hell, but these bits of news make me a little less skeptical.

False lead via io9. Correction via firstshowing.net

While the crowd, admittedly small, on Hacker News wasn’t too excited, I have to say I’m intrigued by the recently widely opened rdio. The company’s blog has some of the product details including:

• Select any and all of our seven million songs and play them, on-demand, as much as you want.

• Sync as many songs as you can fit on your phone, and play them even when you’re offline (and of course, play everything when you’re online).

• Follow friends to find new music, rather than staring at an empty search box

• Find friends from Twitter, Facebook and email

• Discover music in industry insiders’ Collections and Playlists, such as Spin Magazine, Pitchfork, KCRW Radio, The FADER and XLR8R Magazine

Not sure I’ll be into all the social features, but having a huge music library accessible from an iPod Touch is enticing.

Reminds me that I should check out last.fm’s iPod Touch client, if it exists.

You won’t get one from me. I’ve seen variations on this SF v NY, Stanford v New Jersey, West Coast v East Coast, theme a few times over the years. And while I spent 8 great years in the Bay Area, I can’t really speak much to NYC’s tech scene. Besides, I just love big cities in general, so I take all of these harangues as the venting of a singular individual with a decidedly narrow viewpoint.

But every now and then you have to admire the overall writing quality of an unhinged rant. Witness Antonio Garcia-Marquez just unloading on New York:

New York will never be more than a tech sideshow.

Thinking the New York tech scene will ever equal Silicon Valley is as foolish as thinking San Francisco’s puny theater district will one day take on Broadway. Both Silicon Valley and Broadway are unique products of the cities that spawned them, and every attempt to create a Silicon Alley/Silicon Sentier/Skolkovo/whatever in various parts of the world have failed. So far, no one’s managed to do it, and New York sure as hell won’t either.

…

In the Bay Area, you drive through Atherton or Woodside and see the mansions that Netscape, Apple, and Oracle built. On the Upper East Side you see houses built thanks to the depredations of previous generations, and owned by the predators of today (probably their children).

In the Bay Area, new money is better than old. In New York, it’s precisely the opposite. The mythology is all wrong.

I suspect Garcia-Marquez was mostly yanking chains, but the tone is just smirkingly self-righteous enough to make you nod your head occasionally, even though you don’t believe a word of his BS. And it’ll squeeze a chuckle or two out of you.

Not quite a Shivers class rant, but I found it quite entertaining.

Of Richard K. Morgan’s book Thirteen, a.k.a. Black Man in the UK, I once wrote:

Published in 2007, I wonder how Morgan interpreted the events of the 2008 Presidential elections. Must have sort of felt like contradiction and vindication at the same time.

Given what happened to Representative Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), I’d bet Morgan would tell me it’s all vindication. What contradiction?

Inglis fell victim to a Tea Party wave in South Carolina, despite being, in word and deed, inarguably conservative. Just not ornery enough to be completely obstructionist. And he had well reasoned positions and arguments (such an elitist intellectual thing to do).

We’re getting to the point where bringing reason to a political argument is like bringing a knife to the proverbial Chicago gunfight.

Finished reading Jeff VanderMeer’s short story Errata today. Like many other readers, who probably came expecting a work of standard speculative fiction, I was mostly confused by the surreal nature of the tale, although I enjoyed it.

I think. Maybe. Sort of.

The whole story is freely available on tor.com, but I got the 99 cent e-book version through Amazon’s Kindle store. I did the reading on my iPod Touch which was fairly pleasant. It got even better once I figured out I could decrease the font size so I didn’t have to flip pages as much. Suggestion to other newcomers to Kindle for the iPhone, press those little A’s in the interface, and experiment a bit. Might improve your reading experience.

At least I chuckled at mentions of Juliette the Penguin.

Link parkin’: superuser.com has been building a collection of terminal hacks for Mac OS X.

Maybe this will ring a bell for someone.

On my iPod Touch, I have mail set up to use IMAP. From my RSS reader, NetNewsWire, I occasionally e-mail myself items that should get auto filtered into a particular folder. Intermittently, the Mail program simply uses IMAP to place the outgoing message into my sent folder and leaves it at that. Mail will completely skip sending the message through my SMTP server at mailhop.org. This scotches my automated filtering.

I switched my outbound SMTP server to one of Google’s, and now things seem to be a little more consistent. Weird.

So the movie Kids, directed by Larry Clark, turned 15 today. In that acknowledgement of 15 years is a lament for a New York that used to be.

Kids occupies an odd place in my movie experience. At 28 I wasn’t close to the age group portrayed, but I still had a little affinity from my contact with the SF rave scene. I went out of my way to catch the flick when I was visiting some friends in Pittsburgh, specifically because I wanted to see the portrayal of N.A.S.A. And of course the manufactured controversy about “A wake up call to the world!”

While I distinctively remember the movie, even only seeing it once, I can’t really call it a guilty pleasure. First it’s disturbing. You see a lot of malicious acts in modern cinema, but seeing “realistic” teens do it on the big screen (at least at that time) throws you off kilter. Second, it’s not entertaining. There is an overall plot, but the movie is really a sequence of staged pieces, with a barely engaging connective thread. You don’t walk out of the theater feeling you had a good time. Plus to be a guilty pleasure, it needs repeated viewing, and as I said I’ve only seen it once.

I will say this, it’s a provocative film. And another nice aspect is that New York, the actual ground level city with all it’s rivers of people and gritty nooks and crannys, featured prominently as a character.

Between Kids and Bully, Larry Clark makes me a little nervous.

If I had Netflix, I’d definitely watch Kids again. Available on the iTunes store though, maybe I’ll rent it.

P.S. I didn’t realize N.A.S.A. was homed in The Shelter

Coming to Verizon FiOS TV from DirecTV over a year ago, one of the major irritants was the channel guide. You’d think it wouldn’t be a big thing, but it seriously has me considering switching back to DirecTV, among a bunch of other things.

When we switched over, the main problem was the number of button presses it took to get the full episode information. Maybe there’s a smarter way, but it always takes me three.

Recently, things seem to have gotten worse. First, the episode info, especially for premium channels, often doesn’t have any actor information. Second, the category errors are increasing. Take for example, The Center of the World starring Molly Parker and Peter Sarsgaard. It’s a film about a depressed guy, holing up in Vegas, who pays a hooker to hang out with him for three nights. Strong adult themes are the order of the day. Verizon happily categorized it as Children. That’s it.

Sigh.

Then again this is an extreme First World problem to have.

Since I’ve been experimenting with using my iPod Touch as an e-book reader, I’m more alert to the overall e-reader market. Amazon’s latest Kindle, at $139 for the Wi-Fi only edition, is a pretty tempting gadget.

There’s plenty of recaps kicking around the ‘net, but I liked Engadget’s quick reactions. Here’s the highlights:

• Cheaper

• Faster page turning

• Lighter

• Longer battery life

• More storage

The highly useful comments on Hacker News also break down the tradeoffs between the Kindle and other e-book devices/approaches at an OCD level. Of course the device really is dedicated to reading and targeted at folk who read, particularly books, a lot.

Can you say “Moore’s Law in effect”? The thing is now pretty doggone close to an impulse purchase for mere mortals. Kindle pricing has moved down into game console cost territory. And the programming is a bit cheaper.

I’m not down on my iPod Touch, but I’m trending towards becoming a computer sherpa (term courtesy Ken Forbus). I’ll probably have an app phone by the end of the year along with some kind of pad or e-reader. A phalanx of the Touch, an Android phone, and a Kindle would make a nice combination.

Hey Lee, let me know what you think of the new Kindles!

Link parkin’: Since my little side project involves SQLite at its core, Brett Wilson’s article provided some good insights on how to get the best out of the little embedded database that could.

Geez I’ve been using RSS for a long time. Recently I noticed that I had an unruly sprawl of feeds across 3 different Google Reader accounts and NetNewsWire on my personal laptop. Time for some housekeeping.

I collapsed most of the feeds from the Google Reader accounts into one account. The few leftover are work related, so I just left them in a work-specific account. Meanwhile, the collapsed set I now read on my iPod Touch using NetNewsWire for that platform.

That pile of feeds covers a large portion of my broad technology, gadget, and culture interests dating back to my past life. It’s a big part of my daily info fix. Reading them on the touch feels a lot more productive. I sit down for one session after work and flick through a big pile of the days items in about 30 minutes. Works better than the intermittent grazing I was doing during the day.

Now I need to make more usage of sending items to Evernote or e-mailing posts from NetNewsWire.

About two years ago, I was lucky enough to catch Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight at the Udvar-Hazy Airbus IMAX Theater. This was after missing the flick on it’s first run in the theater. And failing to see it in the downtown DC screen at the Air and Space Museum because it sold out. And passing again when it came to Udvar-Hazy because I thought it would cost $12 for parking, doubling the price of the film. Thankfully, The Dark Knight made a return engagement.

The great thing about Udvar-Hazy is that

1. It’s a full fledged IMAX screen, not the watered down mall version.

2. They don’t do commercials or trailers. When it’s starting time, the movie you paid for starts.

3. At least when I went, the venue was way undersold, so me and about 10 other fine folks got the theater to ourselves. Imagine the lush IMAX rendition of Gotham City completely filling your visual field.

4. Don’t be fooled by the Udvar-Hazy posted parking restrictions, parking is free after hours.

5. It’s an easy 20 minute ride from my house.

Needless to say, I’m completely stoked that Inception is making an engagement at Udvar-Hazy. A lot of folks seem to like the movie, while there’s a vocal segment who don’t. Whatever the case may be, seeing it on a massive IMAX screen will be an interesting experience.

An interview with Joey Negro, which deserves its own post, surfaced the name of Pal Joey. In the murky depths of my DJ hind brain, I remembered Pal Joey as being somewhat legendary, but the big hits didn’t leap immediately to mind.

Finally got around to looking up Pal Joey on discogs.com and man does he have a pretty impressive discography. Soho’s Hot Music is probably the most legendary track (I’ve got the Outer Rhythm version parked in storage), but there’s a host of other significant original, production, and remix efforts across all forms of dance music.

Didn’t know he’d gotten his introduction to the scene working at New York’s legendary Vinylmania record shop.

Didn’t know he’d worked with KRS-ONE on Love’s Gonna Get’Cha.

Didn’t know he’d remixed Deee-Lite’s How Do You Say…Love.

Didn’t know he’d remixed The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds.

Didn’t know he’d remixed Sade’s Cherish the Day.

Didn’t know the Earth People tracks Dance and Reach Up to Mars were some of his earliest cuts. Need to dig in to my archives and see if I have these collector’s items.

And according to the Pal Joey Music discography he’s still going strong.

I think I’ve given up on the HTC Evo. The reviews are a little too mixed with not enough bang for buck over an iPhone 4. The criminal charges against the Evo’s battery life seem to be sticking.

But Motorola’s Droid X, Verizon’s answer to the Evo, looks like it has some potential. First off, I’m not seeing the battery life complaints. Second, you’re only in for an extra $20 to use it as a mobile hotspot, albeit for only 2GB a month. The upside is that none of your hotspot bytes count against your mobile smartphone limit, which is unlimited for $30 a month.

The general consensus seems to be it’s a good hardware package, decent call performance, with good battery life, but the UI falls a little short. Pricing is closer to the iPhone than the Evo, with similar bandwidth limitations. Seems like a safe app phone choice if you’re not into Apple, AT&T, or 4G.

Here’s the reviews I’ve seen so far:

ArsTechnica was mostly positive. The overall package reviewed well, but various fit, finish, camera, and UI coherence dings prevented them from raving.

The Droid X is an impressive device that delivers a lot of compelling functionality. It couples outstanding hardware specifications with a great battery life and some useful software customizations. The product’s weak areas are in the incompleteness of its custom software stack, its general lack of polish relative to other custom Android environments like HTC Sense, and its noisy camera hardware and user-unfriendly camera software.

Gizmodo was generally down. The writing of the review was a bit over the top:

As a pure expression of the limits of mobile hardware and industrial design, the Droid X is kind of a beautiful thing. But that’s about the only good thing about the Droid X.

The software—a discordant melange of the not-so-fresh Android 2.1 and various bits of the Blur “social networking” interface from Motorola’s lower-end Android phones—is the shudder-inducing poster child for the horrors that can occur when most hardware companies try to make software. It’s ugly, scattershot, and confusing. It feels almost malicious.

AnandTech was a bit more positive than Ars. Amazingly they also soundly beat Ars on thoroughness and attention to detail in the review, not that Ars was slouching. However, it is a bit more geeky, with a decided emphasis on performance benchmarks.

If you’re on Verizon and prefer the larger screen, the Droid X takes our pick for the best Android phone on the market today. All we really need is a good Nexus One successor for those users who want something a bit smaller, and maybe an entirely new form factor for the ultimate smallest in devices.

Engadget’s review was first out the block, somewhat thinner than the others, and slightly lukewarm.

Cast in that light, the Droid X becomes a much less magical phone than the Droid was. It’s good, and it’s a pretty enjoyable execution of Android 2.1, but it’s not a must-have phone — especially in light of the Droid Incredible and the upcoming Droid 2. From a hardware perspective, this phone is pretty much a bang-on execution of what a high-end mobile powerhouse should be, but Motorola clearly still has work to do in order to play in the same software league as HTC does with Sense. If it can get there — or heck, if it can just offer this phone with stock Froyo — you’ve got perhaps the best Android phone ever made.

At work I’m stuck with Windows XP, papered over to look like UNIX as much as possible. Luckily our sysadmins have installed a version of GNU Emacs for Windows that works pretty well.

I don’t like the default font, whatever it is. I much rather prefer Lucida Console. So any time I reboot the machine or restart Emacs, I had to right click on the main frame and select Lucida Console. You’d think as a tried and true geek, I’d follow the DRY principle on this one. But noooooooo…

I’ve been doing this little font setting dance for over 3+ years. Pathetic.

Knowing from long experience how arcane configuring Emacs can be, I was dreading a multi-hour session reading Info files and writing Emacs Lisp. But last week I finally hunkered down and decided to nail this one. Only took me about 45 minutes or so combining Google searching and Emacs Lisp experimentation.

Turns out the key is understanding the Emacs frame (window to the rest of the world) parameters and ignoring the face stuff. Faces are Emacs way of specifying font stylings for regions of text. They play nice with Emacs options customization menu. You’d think they would be one stop shopping for text options. But even if you set the default font for the default face, your text won’t show up right in every frame.

Here’s what you want in your .emacs.el, emacs.el, init.el or whatever:

(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist

'(font . "-outline-Lucida Console-normal-r-normal-normal-11-82-96-96-c-70-iso8859-1"))

This says, for every frame opened, use my particular version of Lucida Console to initialize the frame’s text font parameter. Then per frame settings and face stylings can kick in afterwards. Generating the font specification is left as an exercise to the reader. default-frame-alist, besides letting you set the default font, also initializes some obvious window geometry and color parameters, as well as some fun stuff like opacity and window bar title.

And with that, I save myself a whopping 10-15 seconds every time I start up Emacs, along with my sanity.

One last thing, I tried using set-default-font and it did not work.

Just as a point of reference, here’s the result of (emacs-version) on my work machine:

"GNU Emacs 21.3.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of 2004-03-10 on NYAUMO"

So Your Mileage May Vary.

Posted in the hopes that this may help someone else someday.

Just poking around for cheap books in Amazon’s Kindle e-book section, I found this collection of Conan the Barbarian short stories:

• Gods of the North (a.k.a. The Frost Giant’s Daughter)

• Queen of the Black Coast

• Shadows in the Moonlight

• A Witch Shall be Born

• Shadows in Zamboula

• The Devil in Iron

• The People of the Black Circle

• The Pool of the Black One

• Red Nails

• Jewels of Gwahlur

• Beyond the Black River

• The Hour of the Dragon

• The Hyborian Age

These are all top of the line Robert E. Howard originals, no L. Sprague De Camp to be found. I’m particularly excited to have some version of Beyond the Black River, one of the best Conan stories ever.

Oh and all this for only 99 cents.

Okay, so I went $1 over budget. But I felt like I couldn’t have just one book on the Kindle for iPod. It might get lonely. At least Amazon finally got the Tor.com titles up on the Kindle store. Apologies in advance if the titles were hidden on a shelf and obscured from my view.

In any event, taking advantage of the Tor.com special I purchased the following short stories:

1. After the Coup by John Scalzi (iBooks)

2. Down on the Farm by Charles Stross (iBooks)

3. Shade by Steven Gould (Kindle)

4. The Girl Who Sang Rose Madder by Elizabeth Bear (iBooks)

5. Jack and the Aktuals, Or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory by Rudy Rucker (iBooks)

6. Errata by Jeff VanderMeer (Kindle)

On a whim, I started with VanderMeer’s Errata. I don’t know if it’s SF, but it’s pretty damn weird. But oddly engaging. And the Kindle iPod reading experience has been pretty good so far.

ArsTechnica’s Jacqui Cheng conducts a faceoff between Verizon’s MiFi and Sprint’s Overdrive 4G mobile hotspots. The results aren’t particularly conclusive, but I enjoyed this sentence:

On top of the MiFi’s pretty looks, it also performs better at basic tasks like turning on and shutting down. While the MiFi can power on and off and be ready to use within seconds, the Overdrive takes its time powering on—taking a minute or more. If that sounds bad, things are about to get worse.

Not very promising.

Cheng provides loose, basic performance measurements. For uploads and downloads the Overdrive does really well on a 4G network and somewhat worse than the MiFi on a 3G network. So no clear winner. Cheng also throws in a comparison with a tethered iPhone 4 on AT&T’s 3G network, which does surprisingly well. Ping times are horrible on the iPhone 4 though.

Frankly, if I had to pull a trigger, for my needs I’d go with an iPhone 4, punt on the mobile hotspots, and use the savings to max out the storage on the iPhone.

The science fiction publisher Tor is running a special of sorts. As an experiment in supplying content for various e-readers, they’re making a bunch of previously posted short stories available for 99 cents. Authors include John Scalzi and Charles Stross, two of my favorites, along with Elizabeth Bear and Steven Gould, two I need to check out.

It might seem stupid to pay for content that’s already been freely posted and is still available on the Web. But I figure it’s worth five bucks to to test drive e-books on my iPod touch, buy at a price that works for me, and support the authors. Also, gives me a chance to try out the iBooks and Amazon stores.

Current score, Apple 1, Amazon 0. I can pre-order the short stories from iBooks whereas the Kindle store is showing neither hide nor hair.

Over and above the fact that the only major (e.g. national or international) sporting event of note was golf’s Open Championship, a.k.a. The British Open, I noticed that all of the live coverage was only on ESPN. You got some mop-up “best of” coverage on ABC after the live coverage was over, but otherwise you were SOL. Is this the first “major” event that’s gone from at least some over-the-air to cable only?

If you don’t have cable or satellite (Internet?) and you’re a sports fan, things are looking increasingly grim.

But not to worry, suggests ESPN executive vice president John Wildhack: “The delineating between broadcast (TV) and cable is over. If you asked anyone under 40 the difference … you’d get a quizzical look.”

You might be able to get some local team games over the air, but even there much of the product has migrated onto cable. This applies to all sports. On broadcast today, in my market (DC with the Nationals and Orioles), you got FOX MLB on Saturday and a celebrity golf tournament on Sunday. That was your broadcast sports selection for the weekend!

Thumbs up. ESPN having close to comprehensive live coverage, despite the time difference and the wacky Friday weather.

Thumbs down. ESPN had way too many undifferentiated talking heads. I couldn’t tell the difference between Tom Watson and Tom Weiskopff. Actual stroke coverage seemed to suffer. Found their Open Championship fillers (voiced by Ian McShane) as overly pompous. On top of it all, they got a pretty undramatic final round. Yawn!

Just for fun, I completed a pretty basic implementation of automatically storing Python lists of integers in an SQLite database. Python’s sqlite3 module provides hooks for extending a db connection with functions to automate the conversion of Python types on the way in and out. wirebin provided the serialization and deserialization.

For a braindead performance evaluation of deserialization, I created a million row database, with a single column corresponding to the list datatype. The size of the lists stored ranged from 1 to 1000 elements, elements ranging in value from 1 to 1000. Using Python’s builtin timing functions, all rows can be retrieved, using automatic deserialization, in about 5 seconds. A very coarse test, but indications are that it takes on the order of microseconds to pull a list out of the DB. Not bad, and I expect that this would scale linearly, and very slowly, with the number of elements in the list. I need to do a simple timing of serialization and insertion, but I anticipate that should be in the same order of magnitude.

One gotcha that tripped me up is that binary data, e.g. as generated by wirebin, has to be converted into an SQLite binary blob using sqlite3.Binary. You can’t just send any old string. And SQLite may silently drop your inserted value if you don’t do this conversion. I suspect null characters are the offending culprit. So for a while there, my list objects were going missing, yet I wasn’t getting any errors or exceptions. On the way out, you get a buffer object, which can be cast to a string and then fed to wirebin for deserialization. It’s all good.

Slouching towards prefuse in Python. Now I just have to figure out the right representations for nodes, edges, and lists of each.

This one had been bugging me for a while. I had a big playlist of dj mix MP3s downloaded from the ‘Net. Hadn’t listened to the vast majority and wanted to nuke ‘em all in one fell swoop. Selecting all and hitting Delete just removed them from the playlist.

Turns out selecting in the playlist and hitting Option-Delete deletes from the iTunes library.

Sanity preserved. Space recovered. Thanks Google. Thanks Mac OS X Hints. Hope this post helps someone else get over this hump.

Chris Heathcote observes that last.fm was looking to hire a “data griot”, although I think the position listing has been removed. I’m guessing the job involves data analysis, visualization, and storytelling about the results. I’d sign up for that gig!

The terms data science and data scientist seem like they might be heading for fad territory, but the demand for a particular combination of hard skills is definitely on the way up. I’m not sure how merging those talents with the artistic stylings of a real griot is advantageous in a commercial context, but with an explosion of massive data, I can see an expansion in creative opportunities.

In short, there’s a lot more room for guys like Jonathan Harris.

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.