What we’re gonna do right here is go back. Way back. Back into time. This week I just completed reading a book from the my youth that I hadn’t revisited in a long time.

I can’t quite peg when I first read Piers Anthony’s A Spell for Chameleon, but it was one of the most formative books of my youth. Triangulating a little, I believe Castle Roogna had been published when I first read Chameleon, because I hungrily devoured Roogna and The Source of Magic quickly thereafter. 1979, 12 years old, 6th or 7th grade feels about right. At just the point when a young geek has graduated from the young adult fantasy of his time (The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Chronicles of Prydain) and is ready for some more adult fare.

And that’s exactly what A Spell for Chameleon was, although it doesn’t feel that way to start. Rereading the book, it’s not the most complex piece of literature. When I first started the reread, I was disappointed in the amount of straight exposition. The characters seemed simplistic and paper thin. The plot seemed to move along through a number of contrived conveniences.

But then Bink’s tale of trying to uncover his magic talent and avoid exile from the magic land of Xanth becomes rich in adult complexity and nuances. There are hints of this in the rape “trial” early in the book, the encounter with Crombie the Soldier, and Bink’s posession by a shade. After the Evil Magician Trent enters the stage though, the many facets of leadership, wisdom, heroism, self-doubt, villainy, self-sacrifice, romance, and love emerge. While still eminently, and tastefully, accessible to a teenager, A Spell for Chameleon actually uses the tropes of the fantasy genre to reveal the complexity of adult human relations.

Not to mention Anthony’s take on the female nature (the titular Chameleon) and relationships between men and women.

To sum up, A Spell for Chameleon has held up well over time. In fact, as a much more mature individual, it’s even better than I remembered. However, that dose of Xanth will probably do me for quite a while.

And now a few words about the tragedy of Xanth’s legacy.

One of the fun things about reading Fantasy is the emphasis on extended series of novels. Like the Romance and Mystery genres, many Fantasy readers seem to thrive on getting more of the same. This can also be considered one of the pitfalls of the genre, the Xanth series being a prime example.

In my teens I was sucker for series. Of course I read and revered The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I slogged through The Silmarillion. I think I made it through about six of L. Ron Hubbard’s Mission Earth series (complete crap), not to mention the horrid 1000+ pages of Battlefield Earth. I did the first six of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone novels were great stuff. Shannara? Yup. Chronicles of Camber? Yup. Dragon Riders of Pern? Ditto. I even did Anthony’s Bio of Space Tyrant, Incarnations of Immortality, Apprentice Adept, and Cluster series.

Oddly enough, I never actually got sucked into the Discworld series, although I have read one or two recently.

And I made it through nine, maybe even eleven, of the Xanth novels before I came to my senses and realized that authors and publishers were just milking fan adoration all the way to the bank. After being supremely disappointed with Golem in the Gears, Anthony mailed that one in just lathering on the puns, I vowed never to read more than three books in a series ever again. To my knowledge I’ve held to that.

Reading the Wikipedia page for Xanth, I was incredulous to see that Anthony went on to publish a grand total of 33 Xanth novels, with two more to come. Piers Anthony seems like a great human being, who’s brought a lot of enjoyment to people. I find it sad that he’s become so typecast into the world of Xanth that it’s “just about the only thing the publishers want.”

Another year, another bracket disappointment. No way I can finish in the money in my bracket pool, so now I have completely free rooting reign in this weekend’s Final Four. Besides being the underdogs, here’s why I’m rooting for the Butler Bulldogs:

• As a long time Maryland Terrapins fan, not exclusively though, I can never root for Duke.

• Since Michigan State put Maryland out this year, can’t root for the Spartans

• Never did cotton to Bob Huggins. His programs always struck me as skirting that thin limit of giving sketchy guys opportunities and flat out cheating.

By process of elimination, that leaves Butler. Against a full staffed Michigan State team, they’d probably be prohibitive underdogs, but with the Spartans nicked up they might have a shot of making it to the finals.

Frankly, I’m really fiending for some NBA playoff action. A little over two weeks to go before the stakes get serious in the Western Conference. The Eastern Conference has potential for some excitement (c.f. Bull-Celtics 2009), but the marquee is the Orlando-Cleveland rematch.

Just recently, I regaled you with my lust for the upcoming HTC Evo as my ideal smartphone cum 3G hotspot. Well, Verizon just went and theoretically blew that lust out of the water with announcements about the Palm Pre Plus:

• First off, you can actually buy a Palm Pre Plus now, as opposed to this summer for the Evo.

• The Palm Pre Plus can be used as a WiFi serving, portable 3G hotspot, ala the MiFi.

• Verizon completely dropped the data fee for using the device as a hotspot.

• Verizon dropped the hardware price to $49.99, two year contract obviously. But the 1 year contract price is a reasonable $149.99.

• Through work, I can get a 20% discount on the voice plan and the mandatory data part of the plan. Bottom line, I’d wind up paying about $70 a month. Quite manageable.

• It’s not on AT&T’s network.

So what’s not to like? Well, the device runs Palm’s webOS. All the cool geeks are on Android and the hipsters on iPhone OS. Besides Engadget drew up a survival guide for Palm. Meanwhile, ArsTechnica just flat out declared Palm dead. The comments on the ArsTechnica are pretty damning as well.

But for a year, it might be worthwhile. Palm can’t die that fast can they? In that one year, something Evo-like might come to Verizon and there could actually be some real rollout of LTE.

Very, very tempting

DJ Mark Farina has got a website. Or at least another one that’s a bit less busy than his MySpace site. The website has lots of goodies, like a list of upcoming tour dates and a nice bio. Mark Farina’s also on Twitter.

Did I mention I’m in the tank for Mark Farina? And Mark Farina’s got a podcast. Looks like one new mix a month.

Apropos Vincent Vega “Podcast’s taste goood. Mixes taste gooood.”

I’ve been using Scheme for going on 25 years. Really.

While I’ve always had a soft spot for the Lisp with “an exceptionally clear and simple semantics and few different ways to form expressions,” I had a big complaint once I tried to use it outside the classroom. Call it “no batteries included”. At least throughout most of the 90’s, many Scheme implementations didn’t come with enough libraries to usefully interface to the rest of the real world. You always had to build up a lot of stuff from first principles, or try to leverage some library off the net with ill-defined provenance.

Meanwhile, you could get rolling with Perl, Python, and Tcl right out of the box. And yes I know all the reasons this was, and the pros and cons.

While Scheme will probably always be a niche language, times have changed on the “batteries included” front. To wit JazzScheme:

JazzScheme is a development system based on extending the Scheme programming language and the Gambit system. It includes a module system, hygienic macros, object-oriented programming, a full featured cross-platform application framework, a sophisticated programmable IDE and a build system that creates binaries for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. JazzScheme has been used for more than 10 years to develop high-quality commercial software.

I also remember having an entertaining dinner in Chicago with Matthias Felleisen, the godfather of PLT Scheme, soon to be PLT Racket.

PLT Scheme is an innovative programming language that builds on a rich academic and practical tradition.

It is suitable for implementation tasks ranging from scripting to application development, including GUIs, web services, etc.

It includes the DrScheme programming environment, a virtual machine with a just-in-time compiler, tools for creating stand-alone executables, the PLT Scheme web server, extensive libraries, documentation for both beginners and experts, and more.

I’m pretty happy with Python these days, but if I was suddenly banned from using that language, I’d happily migrate back to Scheme.

Apple released a whopper of an update for Snow Leopard today. There’s lots of in-depth coverage in various places.

All I know is that this update is supposed to fix this pain in the ass DNS bug. The short story is that Apple pushed DNS resolution facilities completely into the mDNSResponder daemon. Problem was that if a DNS server would occasionally time out, mDNSResponder would adjust the order in which it would solicit DNS servers. This can cause problems where you use a local DNS server to resolve machines on your LAN, then an ISP or public DNS server backs up your local server. Eventually errors like this would pop-up:

ssh: Could not resolve hostname nightcrawler: nodename nor servname provided, or not known

The bug wasn’t a heinous show stopper, renewing your DHCP lease seemed to fix it, but it was still a major irritant.

There’s allegedly a fix to support this DNS situation according to Apple’s update notes. Hopefully if anyone else is still suffering from this pest, this post can point them in the right direction.

Actually, there shouldn’t be much guilt in liking Guy Ritchie’s Snatch. The original New York Times movie review spoke fairly favorably of the film and it was a Critic’s Pick. However, Ebert was a bit down on the film thinking it a tad too similar to Ritchie’s previous Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Maybe it’s Ritchie’s marital association with Madonna that engenders the guilt.

Snatch is a fairly comedic, frenetic gangster romp, set mainly in England. A garish cast of dumb thugs conveniently run into each other repeatedly across multiple plot threads. Ritchie’s hyperkinetic editing style keeps things moving. Some highlights:

• Brad Pitt playing a well-nigh incomprehensible Irish Gypsy boxer.

• Character names like: Brick Top, Turkish, Franky Four Fingers, Bullet Tooth Tony, and Boris “The Blade”

• Tyrone as not the most nimble, of mind or of foot, getaway driver.

• Jason Statham’s typical cool machismo. He’s not completely monotone in this one, exhibiting a bit of comedic timing.

• Benicio Del Toro masquerading as a Hasidic Jew to rob an Antwerp diamond broker. Vere is da stoooone?.

• Nicola and Teena Collins as easy on the eyes twin daughters of Doug “The Head”, a wannabe Jewish diamond dealer.

What clinched Snatch as a keeper for me was when Cousin Avi, Dennis Farina, responded to the customs officer’s “Anything to declare?” with “Yeah. Don’t go to England”.

Robbie Allen of StatSheet.com is trying to automate sports reporting through monitoring of game statistics. In his description of his approach, looks like the final output will be in a bloggish format. My guess is that the results will feel closer to a liveblog than a polished newspaper article. ReadWriteWeb has a deeper conversation with Allen about what he’s attempting.

There’s also a similar project, called SportsMonkey, from some of my former colleagues at Northwestern University. From the ReadWriteWeb article you can get a sense of what SportsMonkey provides, and a floor for what StatSheet should be able to achieve.

It’ll be interesting to see if either approach gains traction. And as always with the news/publishing in these times, the key question is where the revenue comes from. Even if it’s automated, still gotta feed the servers.

I’ve really enjoyed Massive Attack over the years. They’ve recently released a new album, Helgioland. Via io9 I ran across the video for Splitting the Atom. Not quite sure it lives up to io9’s hype, but it’s an interesting exercise.

Massive Attack-Splitting the Atom-directed by Edouard Salier from edouard salier on Vimeo.

Apropos of Massive Attack, I have to strongly dissent with Sashe Frere Jones’ opinion of Massive Attack’s Mezzanine. Although he does say Mezzanine is “equally strong” compared to Blue Lines, the rest of the article feels like a subtle dis. Mezzanine‘s grungy, darker, downer tempos are the pinnacle of their work. I like a lot of the earlier more danceable stuff, especially Unfinished Sympathy, but Angel and Group Four make the top of the Massive Attack list for me.

Between Massive Attack and a reemergent Sade, might be time to visit some old friends through an MP3 store.

Continuing the revisit my youth reading trend, Conan of Cimmeria is the fourth book I’ve completed this year. This one was sort of interesting. A collection of short stories, Conan of Cimmeria really demonstrates the gap between Robert E. Howard’s tales and the work of L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter. Those latter two are better writers and more widely published than I’ll ever be, but man their contributions were crap. While I wouldn’t call Howard’s stories great, I was actually surprised at his attempts to be evocative and lyrical in his writing.

Take for example, the opening paragraph of The Frost Giant’s Daughter:

The clangor of the swords had died away, the shouting of the slaughter was hushed; silence lay on the red-stained snow. The bleak pale sun that glittered so blindingly from the ice-fields and the snow-covered plains struck sheens of silver from rent corselet and broken blade, where the dead lay as they had fallen. The nerveless hand yet gripped the broken hilt; helmeted heads back-drawn in the death-throes, tilted red beards and golden beards grimly upward, as if in last invocation to Ymir the frost-giant, god of a warrior-race.

In comparison, De Camp and Carter’s stories tend to be mealy mouthed, formulaic, and bland. As an example, just compare Howard’s treatment of Belit in The Queen of the Black Coast, versus De Camp and Carter’s Tananda in The Snout in the Dark. Belit is a vibrant exciting female character. Howard makes her passion and vitality come through. You actually feel it a little when you find out her tragic fate. Meanwhile, Tananda is a cookie cutter tyrannical queen, conveniently tossed aside at the end of the tale to clean up some plot threads. Granted, she’s not meant to be heroic like Belit, but still she could have been an interesting character. However, it felt like the authors were in a hurry to get through the plot and so had to make short work of her.

Besides, Howard’s evil monsters just seem way more eviler than De Camp and Carter’s.

So thanks to The Frost Giant’s Daughter and The Queen of the Black Coast this was a much more worthwhile read than Conan the Buccaneer. Again, it’s not top of the line writing, even constraining to genre fiction, but it was entertaining and I didn’t feel stupider when I was done.

So reading this Gizmodo review of Sprint’s new smartphone, the HTC Evo, there may finally be a modern phone that I’m willing to buy. I have an ancient 5+ year old phone. I would upgrade to a smartphone (iPhone, Nexus One) but for 1) the added $30+ premium on a data plan you have to buy and 2) similar charges for tethering, if it’s even supported at all. Actually, if it was only the data charges I wouldn’t be put out. But it’s on top of voice plan, and I really underutilize my voice minutes. I have 4500+ rollover minutes on my current account. That’s not a typo. So for my usage pattern, typical plans don’t fit my budget.

Also, my personal laptop is my principle computing device. I’m really hoping to get a plan where I can be completely nomadic, and not have to look for WI-FI hotspots. I want to get on line with my personal computer while sitting in a little courtyard near my office, a nearby park, or during my commuter bus ride.

I’ve really been leaning towards buying a MiFi, but the HTC Evo might dictate a course correction. Looks like it can be used as a combination of smartphone and MiFI, solving my tethering issues. The latest Android build is nice to have. Plus Sprint is rolling out 4G soon, presumably in the DC area, which is a plus. Bleeding edge speed would be fun. And I would still be off of AT&T’s network. What’s not to like?

It’ll all come down to the subsidized phone price and price gouging on the data premium. My hope is that since Sprint already has a $100 all you can eat plan, and they’ve got work to do to build their subscriber base, they’ll be a bit more reasonable. I can live with $100 a month for unlimited access and mobile support for my laptop (and iPod Touch).

Last year I had two posts (Susan Graham, Valerie Taylor) on Ada Lovelace Day, highlighting two pioneering women in computing. This year, the day sort of snuck up on me, even though I got a reminder in my inbox from the Finding Ada folks. A few snippets from other prominent tech folks trickled into my feedstream, and this afternoon I started scratching my head trying to come up with someone to post about. Then I only had to think back to a research meeting I had this very morning.

Thanks to my job, I frequently get to work on research projects with leading academic groups. For one, I’m working with the University of Maryland, Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) and in particular Dr. Catherine Plaisant. The most well-known HCIL member is probably Professor Ben Shneiderman, the lab’s founder and a giant of HCI research. But it’s fair to say Catherine has been, and still is, one of his key accomplices in building the seminal HCI lab. She’s Ben’s co-author on the fourth and fifth editions of Designing the User Interface, the textbook on computer user interfaces. That’s on top of a stellar research record of her own leading to some fundamental interaction techniques that are in wide use today. She recently reached the rank of Research Scientist, which is essentially Full Professor for non-tenure track researchers in the University of Maryland system.

A quick bio hit from her web page:

Dr. Catherine Plaisant is Associate Director of Research of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. She earned a Doctorat d’Ingenieur degree in France in 1982 (similar to a Industrial Engineering PhD) and has written over 100 refereed technical publications on diverse subjects such as information visualization, digital libraries, universal access, image browsing, help, digital humanities, technology for families, or evaluation methodologies. She co-authored with Ben Shneiderman the 4th and 5th Editions of Designing the User Interface, one of the major books on the topic of Human-Computer Interaction.

At our meetings I’m always impressed by her guidance and encouragement of graduate students. She’s unceasingly enthusiastic, energetic, and has lots of good practical advice focusing students toward publishing. With just the little bit of funding my organization has been able to provide HCIL, her team has managed to get a paper accepted for the highly competitive SIGCHI conference, and has a couple more in the chute.

Catherine stands as a good alternative example of how to have research impact in computing without being on the tenure track. And she’s just fun to work with.

Although I’m leaning towards swearing off buying software bundles, I’ll still at least listen to what they have to offer. TheMacBundles is doing something interesting. They’ll let you build your own package of software.

For about $30 you can get your choice of 5 apps from a menu of about 20 plus. If you buy 10 or more, at about $5 per app, you get a little bit of a discount. So ala carte’ is only slightly more expensive than the fixed bundle.

The problem for me is that I think I’ve hit my working set of small utilities and productivity tools, the bread and butter apps of bundles. The odds of any of these small apps making a qualitative difference in my Mac experience is slim relative to the cost. If I’m only going to get one hit per bundle, I might as well just purchase directly from a developer and not split the proceeds.

The One Finger Discount campaign had it right. Offer a significant discount along with a lot of choice, and I’ll buy multiple tempting apps of my own volition.

I only have one word for this past weekend in NCAA tournament action: BRUTAL!!. After Kansas, Georgetown, and Villanova wrecked any chance of winning my bracket pool, I was hoping to get some karma back on Cal and Maryland. Cal just got overpowered by Duke. The Blue Devils were a better team on just about every measure. Their size and their defense pretty much smothered Cal’s hopes in a brutally efficient fashion.

Meanwhile, the gritty Terps hung around, hung around, and hung around some more, until the depleted Michigan State Spartans started running out of gas. I give Maryland, in general, and Greivis Vasquez, in particular, a lot of credit for coming back to take the lead (twice) in the final seconds. Sparty just made one more big, brutal, heartbreaking shot.

N.b. None of the teams mentioned above had “one-and-dones”. All four had senior leadership and returning tourney experience. Didn’t make much of a difference in Cal-Duke, but I thought the level of play was excellent in the Maryland-Michigan State game.

Looks like I may have to resort to rooting for Washington in the hopes that they knock off Kentucky.

Thanks to a good, in-depth review from Matt Neuberg of TidBITS, I’m going to give EagleFiler an extended test drive. From the front page, a couple of features leap out as being particularly useful:

• E-mail archiving and search using the mbox format

• The ability to annotate files with EagleFilter tags and notes

• Live search that’s faster than Spotlight

• Thoughtful integration of AppleScript

Google Desktop Search has never really clicked for me on the Mac. Coming from a Mac centric developer, C-Command Software, maybe EagleFiler will be a better fit.

Between the Georgetown Hoyas getting bumped early, Villanova going down in the second round, and my champion pick Kansas getting dumped (Northern Iowa?!), my brackets are pretty much trashed. Oh well.

Now I can unabashedly root for Maryland and California. With any luck, both will survive to the Sweet Sixteen. If either does, they’ll have a decent chance of making the Final Four.

Go Bears!

Previously I had mentioned that I was disappointed with MacHeist. Turns out that after they made their sales target there was a hidden bonus: Tweetie.

Tweetie’s a minimalist Mac desktop Twitter client. So far I’ve enjoyed using it instead of Brizzly. Obviously Brizzly has the advantage that you can get to it from anywhere you have a browser. Tweetie though demonstrates how much more elegant a desktop app can be than a web one. I may just stick with Tweetie.

man.cx is a really well done web site for UNIX manual pages. From the front page:

Have you ever wanted to check a manual page for a tool you hadn’t installed on the current machine? Well, it happend to me various times. There are some manpage interfaces available on the net, but they all just provide access to the GNU tools or maybe to the tools installed on the host, but they are always missing some pages. So I thought, why isn’t there a page with all manpages? So I just built one.

Might be worth turning into a LaunchBar shortcut.

The Safari, Firefox, and Chrome web browsers are always open on my Macbook. I sort of compartmentalize activities across the three of them, with Safari being my main browser. Transferring URLs amongst the browsers was sort of painful, so I decided to give Choosy a try. Choosy hooks into the system wide URL opening facility and lets you select a browser to handle a URL.

Choosy wasn’t quite what I expected. It’s more of a helper for non-browser apps that occasionally have to open URLs as opposed to redirecting URLs within browsers. My bad. To get Choosy in-browser you have to install extensions for each individual browser. Currently there are only extensions for Safari and Firefox, and the Firefox one only works up to version 3.5. There’s also a bookmarklet that works across browsers and will send the currently viewed URL to Choosy.

Still, Choosy looks quit configurable so while I’m still under the trial license, I’ll see if I can’t make it fit my style.

Been a long time fan of Ted Leung’s blogging. He’s updated his Macintosh Tips and Tricks page and there are plenty of good tips, pointers to useful software, and handy tricks. Particularly useful for UNIX veterans. I’m careful reading and re-reading to see what I can add to my various workflows.

I have a little Linux box in my basement, which I occasionally login to remotely. Dynamic Network Services’ free dynamic DNS service gives that machine a convenient domain name under homeunix.net.

Dynamic DNS has expanded its available domains since I originally signed up. You can even get a hostname under kicks-ass.net. Plus there’s a whole bunch more cool domains for a small fee. Who knew?

Might have to get me a couple of those. Whaddya think of crossjam.kicks-ass.net?

Well, my rooting weekend sort of petered out poorly. Maryland lost in the conference tourney semis, while Cal and Georgetown at least made it to their conference finals. Both finals were thrillers, but the Bears and Hoyas ultimately lost.

Still everyone at least made the tourney. Had to sweat Cal for a bit. Man were the TV experts ragging on the Pac-10 this year. But I couldn’t see four Mountain West teams and only one Pac-10 team.

Like much of the rest of the country, I’ll fork over my n dollars to participate in a bracket pool, root for my favorite teams, and curse when my picks get busted up by Richmond, San Diego State, or Winthrop. The NCAA tourney used to be at the top of my sporting event list although it’s fallen off as the college game has changed over the years. However, I still get up for that first weekend.

Raise your hands if you miss Billy Packer. …Crickets…

Finished Robert J. Sawyer’s Calculating God this past week. The novel was a solid, not spectactular, read. Saywer is one of the more popular and celebrated science fiction writers on the planet, but Calculating God doesn’t stand up to that adulation. Still the book is worth reading.

The premise? Tom Jericho is a paleontologist with Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto. An alien paleontologist, named Hollus, lands in the ROM’s backyard and sets about studying fossils with Jericho. Two major complications of faith factor into Calculating God. First, the aliens believe in an intelligent designer of the universe, which is sort of problematic for a guy like Jericho steeped in the scientific method and dismissive of creationists. Second, Jericho has lung cancer and less then a year to live.

Sawyer uses this setting to explore philosophical issues of life’s relation to God and the universe. David Soya’s review at SF Site captures a lot of my thoughts on Calculating God. One major irritation for me though was that the “scientists” in the story actually didn’t practice any science. Sawyer never really shows them at work. Also, there are a number of points where Jericho and Hollus make assertions, jump to conclusions, and don’t seek out confirming or disconfirming evidence. I also have to agree with most other reviews that the Creationist plot of the story seems like a poor tack-on. Sawyer would have been better served to leave that on the cutting room floor.

Ultimately, Calculating God explores some deep issues in a pleasant and intellectual challenging way. The plot and characters didn’t really move me in a correspondingly meaningful manner, but this was a journey worth taking.

This post was a long time in the making. What we’re gonna do right here is go back. Way back. Back into time…

• Chicago House Music: History in Interviews and Recordings. In which we learn of Gridface’s interview project with many lesser known (but not lesser) names of early Chicago house. Also includes a a bunch of YouTube links of historical house.

• when hip hop arrived. Rapper’s Delight arrives in October 1979. Of course, hip-hop had been born years earlier, but this is arguably the breakthrough point into popular culture. Mandatory discussion of who actually invented hip-hop follows. Great BBC link on an unofficial photographer of the early days of hip-hop.

• A Brief History of Electro.. How the Bronx’s Bambaataa merged Bauhuas music aesthetic, George Clinton’s fashion sense, and disco breaks to create a new musical form. The Bronx rocks to the Planet Rock. Don’t stop. Also, never forget Kraftwerk’s contribution to the DJ music era.

• Born from jungle techno, the amen break, hip-hop and dub: a history of Drum’n’Bass. Whence reggae and rave came together, amped up the BPMs and went all dark and dangerous on us. Of the MetaFilter posts linked to from here, this one is the deepest. Learned more than I wanted to know about UK pirate radio’s contribution. Big ups selecta.

• “I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape.”. On stripping the music down to the essential beats and layering on luxurious synth lines to induce hypnotic, blissed out states of mind. Perfect listening for a drug filled evening. I never really bought into the spacier European edition of Trance, but dug on the harder, darker Acid House inspired stuff exemplified by Phuture’s Mental Breakdown (Roy’s 303 Basement Mix).

• A brief musical history of Garage. Where Larry Levan, NYC’s answer to Frankie Knuckles, carries the embers of the disco flame into a new style named after the Paradise Garage, and in the process innovates much of modern DJing. A kissin’ cousin of Deep House, Garage spawned many descendants, many quite wild.

• Better Living Through Circuitry. The 1999 documentary of the rave scene just before the turn of the millennium. At best a slice of the culture, but still a useful slice. Wonder if anyone ever captured the thoughts of the Wicked Sound System, Left Coast pioneers of the rave scene? I can personally attest to the brilliance of the Full Moon Raves.

Per Wikipedia

A diaspora (in Greek, διασπορά – “a scattering [of seeds]”) is any movement of a population sharing common national and/or ethnic identity. While refugees may or may not ultimately settle in a new geographic location, the term diaspora refers to a permanently displaced and relocated collective.

Born of the disenfranchised, it makes cosmic sense that subsequent to Disco’s revilement, the music would go on to spawn so much. The amount of subsequent creativity generated is incomprehensible. That combination of Latin Jazz/Salsa, Philly Soul, and elements of Funk was and still is a winner.

That was a good chunk of time well spent.

Suitably chastised by one of my best friends, I hereby salute the Cal Bears on their outright Pac-10 Conference championship in men’s basketball. Actually, I’m a bit remiss since this was the Bear’s first solo championship in 50 years. That’s a pretty Big F* Deal! Not to mention they swept Stanford to clinch. Hope this is a sign we’ll get that Rose Bowl trip in my lifetime.

The Bears are off to a good postseason start, smacking around the Oregon Ducks in an easy 90-74 victory to start off their Pac-10 Tourney. Given how they closed out the regular season with convincing wins, under a little pressure, maybe they’re gearing up for a deep run in the NCAA tourney.

Still weird though to think that Mike Montgomery is the head coach.

On other fronts, the Georgetown Hoyas took out Syracuse in the quarterfinals of the Big East tourney. That’ll be a nice one to stoke the rivalry. With Greivis Vasquez and the surprising Maryland Terrapins getting in on the action tomorrow, this could be a pretty good rootin’ week in these here parts. And to think, last year the Hoyas fell off a cliff to end the season, and there were rumblings that the game had passed Gary Williams by.

First off, this quote gave me pause, “I was terrified going in front of the TED crowd — they never boo, but they’re a pretty heavy-duty lot.” The front man for the Talking Heads fearful of a performance?! Leader of the band that dominated the mid-80’s CD players of my college dorm wing? Internationally known and recognized as an excellent musician and entertainer. Yikes!

In any event, Byrne’s essay Creation in Reverse, an expansion of his TED 2010 talk, was good enough for me. I’d have been plenty happy to see it live.

Creation in Reverse discusses how musical venues frame the type of music that are best performed within them. Not just acoustically but even more significantly, socially. The essay is long by weblog standards but this might be the money quote:

It seems that creativity is adaptive, like anything else. When a space becomes available, work emerges to fill it. The genius, the emergence of a truly remarkable and memorable work, happens when the thing is perfectly suited to its context and is also surprising. And when something works, it strikes us as not just being clever — a good adaptation — but as strongly and emotionally resonant. When the right thing is in the right place we are moved.

One of the reasons the piece is long is the wide range of musical venues and styles Byrne examines. Everywhere from the African plains to Carnegie Hall. Everything from drum circles to opera. And the shiny thing that caught my eye were the references to disco club music and hip hop. Such as:

For example, music written for contemporary discos, in my opinion, usually ONLY works in those social and physical spaces. Not only that, it works perfectly on their incredible sound systems. It feels stupid to listen to club music at its intended volume at home — though people do it. And, once again, it’s for dancing, as was early hip hop, which emerged out of dance clubs in the same way that jazz did — by extending sections of the music so the dancers could show off and improvise.

As a 20+ year fan of various threads (House, Hip-Hop, Downtempo, DnB) from the disco diaspora, I almost had to take exception to the, “It feels stupid to listen…” sentence. I listen to these styles of music every day: at home, on the way to work, at work, and on the way back home. Transporting myself to those social spaces where this music works best. On one of the personal space devices he refers to, no less. However, he did add the qualifier, “…at its intended volume …” Plus he points out that the foundational music of the African Diaspora actually does work well for personal listening spaces. All is forgiven.

Well worth the time to read.

Also, apropos my own comment policy, I note that Byrne isn’t taking comments on his journal. I travel in good company. There is however a discussion forum on Talking-Heads.Net

I was mainly laying off of Google Chrome because it didn’t support extensions. Then when Chrome supported extensions, there wasn’t one for 1Password, which I can’t live without. Then when Agile Web Solutions recently released a bleeding edge alpha release for Chrome, that wasn’t working on my machine. Whenever I hit the little 1Password icon, no response.

At least until about 48 hours ago. Oddly, the extension just started working out of the blue. On a whim I decided to hit the button and up popped my login choices. Must have been a reboot I don’t remember. Yeah me!

From what little I’ve done with it, the 1Password extension is nicely executed. One more datapoint of success in case others were wondering. And now I might actually put Chrome to much more use.

Being a fan of cities, I was drawn to Stewart Brand’s contention that the ingenuity of urban slums provide examples of how to make metropolises more green.

The point is clear: environmentalists have yet to seize the opportunity offered by urbanisation. Two major campaigns should be mounted: one to protect the newly-emptied countryside, the other to green the hell out of the growing cities.

You have to parse his argument carefully though. It’s not a call to perpetuate slums, and Brand probably underplays the intense misery and injustice that engenders slum “innovation”. The commenters (and do read the comments) perform quite well in pointing this out. Brand may also oversell the positives of modern urbanism.

Still, a thought provoking take.

MacHeist’s nanoBundle 2 was released last week. Over the weekend I checked it out and decided to ante up the $20 bucks for 5-7 Mac applications. Those apps being:

• MacJournal, writing

• RipIt, DVD ripping

• Clips, clipboard management

• Flow, file transfer

• CoverScout, MP3 art and metadata cleanup

• Tales of Monkey Island, game (after 30K purchases)

• RapidWeaver, HTML authoring (after 50K purchases)

I was mostly interested in CoverScout as a replacement for TuneUp and possibly Clips. Boy was I disappointed.

CoverScout’s publisher requires that you establish a login with them before you can register the program, even if you already have a license code. Their installer forces you to install in the system Applications directory as opposed to a user’s home version. Finally, they also install another program SoundGenie, without any disclosure, or at least I missed the notice. Bad form all the way around.

Clips looked promising, until I went to the developer site looking for documentation or at least a user’s quick start guide. The main site pointed to a wiki. Said wiki only had documentation for another of their products. Not being too inclined to goof around and figure out how Clips works, I started looking at the clipboard facilities in LaunchBar. Clips may not get a second look.

MacHeist also had a little tweet promotion, where you get 3 apps if you tweet about your MacHeist purchase. So I went for it and got access to:

• Airburst Extreme, game

• Burning Monkey Solitaire, game

• Tracks, menubar iTunes controller

I had a trial version of Burning Monkey Solitaire, so at least I’ve got a license for that. I like Synergy so I probably don’t need Tracks, and I’m not a big gamer so Airburst Extreme may never get booted up.

Duly irritated, I went back and checked out what I got for the last MacHesit bundle. Of those 10 applications, I only use one, Acorn, and that only occasionally. At least I thought enough of it to pay Flying Meat directly for an upgrade.

This is making me rethink my position on Mac OS software bundles in general, and MacHeist in particular, although I do like the look of theMacSale. Still seeking a replacement for Google Desktop.

Back when I lived in Chicago, one of the reasons I loved the Windy City was that “the corner bar was still in effect.” This was never more exemplified during the 2005 Major League Baseball season when the White Sox won the city’s first World Series in over 100 years (correction, 80 years). From the run-up to clinching the AL central, through the ALDS versus the Red Sox, the ALCS against the Angels, and sweeping the Astros for the title, it seemed there was a big game every other day. And for each of them I would just walk to the nearest bar, grab a seat and spend a few hours rooting for the Sox. I met a heck of lot of the heart of Chicago in those two or so months.

Over at FloatingSheep, they’ve done some analysis of bar density across America, a bit of which you see to the left. If you can’t discern the outlines, that’s mostly Illinois on the bottom half, and mostly Wisconsin on the top half. Red dots indicate where, as of 2008, Google Maps had more references to bars then grocery stores. While a bit dubious as a metric, it’s still one more piece of evidence to back up my claim that along the shores of Lake Michigan, “the corner bar is still in effect.”

As a fan of stars in general, I note with some interest Google’s application of stars in the main search product. This is a pretty big deal. While Google often experiments with stuff on search results pages, a feature doesn’t get promoted unless it makes a positive difference for a lot of users. I bet Google gets a bunch of good user data out of this feature.

Interestingly Google likes stars for the same reasons I do. They’re an extremely lightweight UI mechanism in terms of cognitive load. Stars don’t take up a lot of screen real estate and they’re not hard to operate. Plus, they can easily be ignored by less sophisticated users.

I wish more personalizable information aggregation applications featured stars.

GNU’s Bash is my command language interpreter of choice. I can’t even remember when I started using it. But I probably only use about 1/10th of its capabilities.

Chanced across this discussion of effective use of Bash’s history mechanism by Jason Bechtel and learned a couple of things. The HISTIGNORE environment variable is a new feature to me. This is the foundation of a neat trick, whereby if you put a space in front of a command then it doesn’t get added to your command history. Handy for leaving out the trivial ls, cd, and, for me at least, pushd executions that litter my command usage.

Also, I was completely ignorant of the shopt command. Learn something new every day.

Misogynistic, homophobic, casually violent, and mostly implausible, Death Race is not without its charms. The attraction boils down to:

• Oddly, Jason Statham’s monotone acting. Has any man gone farther playing a tough guy, a fast driver, and a tough, fast driver?

• The brutal efficiency of the plot. While requiring a lot of suspension of disbelief, there’s not a lot of fat on this tale. There’s really no backstory on any of the characters besides Jensen Ames. And the action doesn’t stop for any crappy infodumps.

• The incorporation of the gamer aesthetic into the cinematic experience. Not overdone as in all of the movies based upon video games, but a subtle commentary surrounding the stages of the Death Race.

• Natalie Martinez is pretty saucy.

Plus, I always find Joan Allen to be a hoot.

Death Race has high production values, a fast pace, good looking women, and the good guys win. There are worse ways to spend 90 minutes.

Speaking of my youth, Prince Rogers Nelson was a pretty big element. 1999 and Purple Rain were just as important to me as Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I lost the vibe around the time of Lovesexy though, and never came back around.

My sister dropped Prince’s Ultimate on me as a Christmas present. I finally ripped the tracks to my iPod last week and have been enjoying it immensely. It’s definitely flawed, although I don’t quite agree with the Discogs.com reviewer that it’s “A real half-assed effort,…” Short edits of When Doves Cry and 1999 are criminal. And for someone like Prince, there’s always other stuff you wish was in the compilation, e.g. Erotic City, Another Lonely Christmas, Anotherloverholenyohead, and a personal favorite of mine: D.M.S.R.

Having said that, some of the extended remixes are definitely worth having. Controversy, Let’s Go Crazy, and Kiss are particularly good. And I always enjoyed Pop Life, but the Fresh Dance Mix is new to me and a really good variation. Oddly, the dance remix for Little Red Corvette didn’t really work to my ears. The album version was just the right serving.

Of course now I’m starving for more. May have to take a trip to the MP3 store for 1999. I mean how can you live without Lady Cabdriver, Automatic, and International Lover?

So I am actually reading this year, although as usual I’m off to a slow start. I decided to visit a local used book store and rummage through some old Science Fiction and Fantasy paperbacks. Found some stuff I read way back in high school, right at the beginning of the Dungeons and Dragons gaming explosion. Never could find a good cohort for a creative, extended campaign.

I’ve finished Conan the Buccaneer and Swords and Deviltry. Amazing contrast. Conan the Buccaneer is paper thin on plotting and characterization and has no literary aspirations whatsoever. L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter were clearly cashing in on the name Robert E. Howard had established. More power to ‘em! I’d almost accuse my teen self of poor taste, but I didn’t know any better.

Swords and Deviltry is a collection of carefully crafted short stories being the introduction of the characters of Fafhrd, The Gray Mouser, and their ill fated joining together. While none of the three tales is particularly complex, Fritz Leiber put some effort into developing Fafhrd, The Gray Mouser, and the world of Newhon. Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser are clearly fantasy archetypes but Leiber doesn’t deny them subtleties and nuance. Swords and Deviltry is also filled with creative use of language and wordplay. Accessible and action packed enough for a naive’ teenager Swords and Deviltry still has something to offer for the wiser mature adult.

Although whoever came up with the cover for the first run of Swords and Deviltry just flat out missed the mark. WTF?!

I’ve been a happy XEmacs user for well over a decade if not close to 15 years. Emacs in general has been a part of my computing life since 1985 when I learned Scheme on MIT’s Hewlett-Packard Chipmunks. When Lucid forked Emacs their X11 support felt so much better I switched from GNU.

However, this old code piker has been trying to get into the git distributed version control system. All the cool kids are doing it! Git is heavily command line driven, but if you live in Emacs you’d really like some integration. None of the git packages worked well for me and XEmacs.

At work, I decided to give GNU Emacs a test drive, since there seemed to be a plethora of git packages, all developed on GNU Emacs. The magit package turned out to work pretty well. Plus, for my personal MacBook, I was pleasantly surprised by David Caldwell’s nightly MacOS X Emacs builds. Worked well straight out of the box. GNU Emacs felt like a first class citizen of MacOS X, whereas the available graphical versions of XEmacs were never smooth for me.

The switch is not 100% set in stone, but I’m feeling like it might stick.

Oh I forgot to mention that Steve Yegge’s extended bloviation on XEmacs proved to be the tipper to at least revisit GNU Emacs.

Someone…
please…
help…
me.

Can’t … stop … playing…
Dieselboy’s The Dungeonmaster’s Guide.

Wink’s Evil Acid (Gridlok Remix) is beyond sick followed so smoothly into Teebee & Calyx’s Follow The Leader. Every time I listen to The Dungeonmaster’s Guide I can’t get those bits out of my head for a few hours.

The only blemish is the tail end of the compilation, which get’s a little too happy for me, bordering on Hi-NRG. Sort of spoils the dark themes and flavors at the beginning of the mix. Still, currently it’s quite hard to push The Dungeonmaster’s Guide out of the rotation.

Above is the result of taking 30 minutes to transliterate Tarbell’s sand.stroke sketch into peyote. Admittedly, it’s basically a subset of substrate, so there’s a lot of similar code. However, I think it’s cool peyote is decent enough to whip stuff out quickly.

I’ve been trawling processing.org and openprocessing.org for interesting sketches. I’ve discovered that I’ll need some Perlin noise generation in the toolbox.

The above image is a capture from a peyote script that transliterates Jared Tarbell’s Substrate processing sketch. I’m pretty sure my peyote sketch is doggone close to Tarbell’s results. At the very least, it captures much of the spirit.

What’s peyote? Peyote is my off hours project to mashup aspects of processing and NodeBox into a Python based programming environment. Why not just processing? Because I really like Python and I think bit blitting in such environments could be greatly enhanced by a high quality multidimensional array package like Numpy. Why not just NodeBox? Adding good bit blitting to NodeBox is beyond my meager talents. Besides, NodeBox is passing me by. Really, it’s just ‘cause I like to party.

So I’ve taken the path of gluing together pygame with pycairo and running with that. The current infantile version of peyote was used to generate the above image.

I could go on tweaking and fiddling with this sketch for days, but I just wanted to mark this milestone. peyote isn’t even remotely close to polished, much less finished. It may never even be released to the rest of the world. But it can actually be used to create something visually interesting.

Yeah me!

I don’t know crap about NASCAR.

I’m not a Will Ferrel fan.

Sascha Baren Cohen is overrated.

I still love Talladega Nights, The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. The movie never fails to get me to chortle out loud. Maybe it’s because of:

• John C. Reilly as Cal Naughton Jr. a.k.a. Mike Honcho.

• OK, Cohen is overrated, but Jean Girard is pretty damn funny. Hakuna matata, bitches!. You spilled my macchiato!

• Leslie Bibb as Carley Bobby is quite easy on the eyes. Then you throw in Amy Adams for good measure.

• The all-star comedy cast. When you’re giving Molly Shannon and Andy Richter bit parts, you know you’ve overprovisioned the talent.

• 1 reason, Walker (Greatest Generation my ass. Tom Brokaw’s a punk!) and Texas Ranger (Chip, I’m gonna come at you like a spider monkey!) at the dinner table.

• Oh hell, the whole damn dinner scene: “I like to think of Jesus as a mischievous badger.” “If we wanted two wussies, we would have named them Dr. Quinn and Medicine Woman!” “I like to think of Jesus as an Ice Dancer, dressed in an all-white jumpsuit, and doing an interpretive dance of my life.”

If you ain’t first, you’re last. Boy did Ferrel fall off after this one.

Talladega Nights isn’t sophisticated, but at least it’s not gross, moves fast, and there’s actually some sly little cheap shots at American hubris. Honest, I don’t feel dumber after having seen it.

Bottom line though, like a good car crash, I always hove to stop and watch Talladega Nights, ‘cause I like to party.