Well my 100 hours project, now named peyote, has been dinking and dunking along. I need to total up the time, but I’ve put in a pretty decent amount of effort. The new year has brought a burst of energy.

I’ve also taken some inspiration from Robert Hodgin’s work and blog, especially the Magnetosphere series, which apparently had quite humble beginnings itself. Hope he doesn’t mind me making a thumbnail of one his pictures. His portfolio site is quite well done.

And today I achieved the smallest of victories.

peyote is intended to be a mashup of the bit processing capabilities of processing with some of the vector drawing capabilities of NodeBox, all in Python. Today I got enough of the pieces together to write a small peyote program that actually created a non-trivially interesting animation.

I’ve got a lot of plans for peyote. It’ll be a slow grind, but I’m slightly pumped. No I don’t have any videos. No I’m not up on GitHub. No I’m not ready to release the code. More to come.

So I’m essentially a Drum ‘N Bass noobie in the extreme. For the past few years I’ve had basically three or four Drum ‘N Bass-ish dj mix CD’s ripped to my iPod. All of them are ancient in the rapidly morphing world of electronica.

Recently though I’ve been wearing out what little DnB I’ve actually got. For a while I was flip-flopping between Hip Hop, thanks to the iTMS strategy, and House, thanks to a large collection. But now I’m really drawn to the DnB for the long commute and even in the office. Something about the high BPMs gets and keeps the blood flowing.

I think I’ve had Aphrodite’s Overdrive for over a year and half, maybe two years now. Towards the end of 2009 I was listening to it every day. I’m especially fond of the vocal aspects: the Jamaican toasting on Living in Darkness and Ruff Neck Style, along with the diva on Sometimes.

In contrast, I finally forced myself to dig around on the Amazon MP3 store and buy some of Dieselboy’s work. Substance D is flat out sick with the high points being the blend of One Of Them into Pressure Drop VIP and closing with N/V/D. As opposed to Overdrive, ain’t no vocals on Substance D, just pure head trip.

So an Aphrodite v Dieselboy mashup followed by a back-to-back mix off might be the Holy Grail, but I bet there’s plenty more for me where that came from.

Time to get into some DJ Dara.

Since I knew you didn’t care at all about my fantasy teams, I relieved you of suffering through status updates over the holidays. Here’s one last blast for your amusement though.

Quick synopsis:

1. Doom Patrol Prime are League Champions in the all important office league. Fantasy bragging rights for a year baby!!

2. Doom Patrol Beta are also League Champions in a random Yahoo! pickup league, but with a different scoring format, thus demonstrating yours truly’s fantasy proficiency.

3. Justice Society had a head-to-head play-in game to make the fantasy playoffs in an ESPN league, and lost by 5 lousy points. I arguably misplayed one or two matchups, but they were coin tosses to begin with.

4. The New Mutants made the fantasy playoffs in an NFL.com league, but were one and done. Emblematic of this team’s collapses this season, I only got one stinking QB touchdown out of all the players. Nobody produced except for my kicker and DST.

3 out of 4 in the playoffs with two championships. Not bad for a third year player. The key for me was seriously and continuously working the waiver wire. By the end of my office league’s season, I was beating people with Beanie Wells, Jerome Harrison, Brent Celek, and Jermichael Finley, players who weren’t fantasy drafted and often available halfway through the season.

I have a lot of hand built XEmacs installations across my personal and work machines. In recent builds there’s been this really irritating error on XEmacs boot. I would always get this message about “symbol's value as variable is void: default-menubar“. The error really didn’t break anything, it was just supremely annoying.

Well a few weeks ago, I finally got around to digging in and debugging this little critter. Pernicious little devil, but I finally tracked it to XEmacs’ initial package load.

Then by brute-force process of elimination I chased it down to the guided-tour package. The package was trying to hook into a menubar system that didn’t exist since I compile my XEmacsen for console mode only.

And here’s the fix:

`(setq guided-tour-insinuate-menubar nil)

`

Dump it in your init.el and kill the irritation.

I pathetically underachieved on the book reading front this month. While I had a 100% completion rate, that’s not saying much when you only start one book.

• Rainbows End. Vernor Vinge. An interesting and fairly entertaining vision of a technology infused future. Not a homerun, but a nice solid double.

Excuses? The wife was out of town for a big part of one week, leaving me on toddler duty. While I finished Rainbows End during the stretch, I was sapped of momentum. Then we had two trips, to Cocoa Beach and Chicago, which usually means lots of reading time. Said toddler was a member of the traveling party though, wiping out most spare reading opportunities and energy. Plus I’m not particularly excited about the current reading choices at hand.

Will have some work to do to meet my goal of 35 this year.

Yup. I’m running a bit late this week, as if you even cared about my fantasy football teams. I’ve got a good excuse though. On Monday a friend of mine went up into orbit on the Space Shuttle as a member of NASA mission STS-129. My family was lucky enough to be invited to attend the launch. More on that later in the week.

In the meantime, I went a satisfying fantasyland 3-1 last week.

Doom Patrol Prime provided the big surprise win. I was playing the #1 team in the office league, trailing by a game. The projected scores were close but the opponent has been consistently overachieving while I’ve squeezed out a few lackluster wins.

Having Randy Moss go off against the Colts on Sunday night was a big thrill. I was also helped out by Maurice Jones-Drew pulling up short of the goal line and getting one less touchdown. My margin of victory was less than 1 point. Thanks MJD. Way to do the right thing.

Now that I’m tied for first in this league, I’m feeling a little bit better about my playoff prospects. Still, there’s a bit of a scrum only two games away in the loss column. I need to keep winning.

Doom Patrol Beta ground out a soporific 30 point win scoring only 70 fantasy points. Two thirds of my team underperformed, but my opponent played a bunch of Steelers and got burnt when the Benglas held them to 12 points. At 9-1 in this league with 4 games left, I’m in great shape to make the playoffs. Just want to keep the momentum going and optimize my lineup for the last couple of weeks of the season.

Justice Society fell again. I pretty much played the optimal lineup that could be played, but just didn’t have the firepower. Still scheming to get this time over .500 by the end of the season.

The New Mutants just squeaked by. I had three double digit scorers while my opponent had two. The rest of the players on both sides were pretty pathetic, with only one reaching the end zone. I got just barely enough receiving yards to get the victory. Still a win is a win.

Haven’t been too heavy on the tech talk here, but a recent discovery bears notice. I’ve been doing some development with redis, “a persistent key-value database…”. If you’re a programmer redis is like a persistent dictionary, similar to Berkeley DB. redis has a network server baked in. Since redis maintains all of its data completely in main memory it’s blazingly fast but is limited by the amount of RAM on a machine.

The key feature of note though is that the values stored in the DB are not restricted to simple strings. Lists, sets, and ordered sets are also provided. A number of atomic operations are also available on instances of these objects. This makes redis very convenient for a number of multiprocessing tasks where the processes coordinate through redis values.

As far as I can tell, the concept of having a handful of higher level datatypes as values in a key-value store is relatively new, although I’m sure there’s some obscure CS paper or tech report somewhere that covers the topic.

I’m typically not into The Cult of Startup, but I do like the posterous product. I’m even using posterous in a casual way. Robert Scoble conducted an entertaining interview with the founders of the tiny company, Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan.

Nothing super deep to be gained other than that the “post” in posterous rhymes with imposter not postal, as I incorrectly thought. Still enjoyed the founders’ perspective on what they’ve accomplished and where they’re going. Looking forward to seeing some of those new features.

Knocked out Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End earlier this week. I liken the experience to reading Charlie Stross’ Accelerando: an intense flood of ideas. However, Rainbows End is not as frenetic as Accelerando and much less Singularity focused, making it a bit more on a human scale. Still the technology extrapolations come fast and furious.

Still puzzling out my feelings about the book. I guess I sort of admire Vinge’s vision and ideas, but I never really connected deeply to the work.

I guess Rainbows End gets a hearty shrug from this reader.

As bad as last week was for my fantasy football teams, this week was great. The various lineups combined for the much desired 4-0 record. Two were expected comfortable wins. One was an expected victory, but way too close for comfort. The last match was projected as nip and tuck, and went to the last quarter of Monday night’s game.

More details after the break.

Doom Patrol Prime was matched up against an absentee owner who started two players on bye. Should be a piece of cake right? Wrong! My team performed slightly better than expected. The opponent lucked into Chicago Bears TE Greg Olsen’s career day with 3 touchdowns. Come the Sunday night game, things were not looking good. I needed Eagles TE Brent Celek to outscore Dallas RB Marion Barber by about two points. Somehow Celek found the end zone and Barber didn’t. VICTORY!

In the all important office league, this victory keeps Doom Patrol barely above a scrum of contenders a game back. I’m still ranked #2, but if I slip and lose a game, it’s a quick fall to #6 based upon points.

And I face the #1 ranked team this weekend. Sigh!

Doom Patrol Beta rolled yet again, winning by 41 points. With an 8-1 record, Beta has a two game lead with five to play. Only a total collapse could keep this team out of the playoffs.

Justice Society, the troubled ESPN league team, was a pleasant surprise for a change, despite facing yet another absentee owner. All of my highly ranked players scored in double figures. This one was over by the end of the 4 pm games. Still in deep playoff trouble with this team though. There are three teams ahead of me for the last playoff spot with four games left to play. Pretty much have to run the table and get a lot of help.

The New Mutants was the most entertaining matchup of the weekend. Both teams were projected to score highly, with a slight edge to my team. The aforementioned Marion Barber, while not horrible, put me in a 12 point hole going into Monday Night Football. My only hope was the last player remaining, Pittsburgh’s Rashard Mendenhall. Unfortunately, Pittsburgh has turned into a pass first team, and indeed that’s how they scored all of their touchdowns. Fortunately, Mendenhall was able to rip off big 20 and 30 yard chunks when he did get the ball, totalling 155 yards on the ground. 15 points on the board along with a victory.

The Mutants are still in the last playoff spot, although there are a couple of other teams right on my tail. Five games left so it’s going to be a dog fight, although I do like how this team is composed.

I had a Safari browser tab sitting around with information on the Google Chrome MacOS Developer Preview. Just got around to downloading and installing a few days ago. I’ve only kicked the tires a little, but have to say Chrome is pretty impressive, even for a pre-alpha. Page loading is noticeably faster than either Safari or Firefox.

There’s exactly one show-stopper from giving Chrome an extended run as the primary browser. Since Chrome doesn’t have much of an extension mechanism, Agile Web Solution’s 1Password doesn’t work with Google’s browser.

1Password has essentially become a part of my Web browsing brain.

I’ve mentioned in the past a need to make some donations and/or purchases for Mac software I use frequently. I recently posted a donation for iStat Menus and today I anted up a small contribution for Carbon Copy Cloner. Putting my money where my mouth is.

Also, a bunch of indie Mac developers are participating in the One Finger Discount campaign as parallel to the MacHeist Nano campaign. 20% off from a whole bunch of small Mac development shops. The intent is to be more developer friendly and get people out of the habit of expecting top notch professional software to be free.

So I used the the discount code to upgrade my version of Flying Meat Software’s Acorn image editing app. I originally got Acorn as part of last Christmas’ MacHeist bundle. That’s at least one positive conversion.

If you like good Mac software, get out there and give the devs some love…and money.

Swordfish, the 2001 movie, resurfaced on HBO this week and I snagged it on the DVR. Despite it’s amazing mean-spiritedness, somewhat ludicrous plot, and abysmal portrayal of hackers I enjoyed the movie on DVD a few years ago and still enjoy it today.

Could it be:

• The overtalented cast starting with Halle Berry and including John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, Sam Shepard and Don Cheadle?

• The insanely poor timing of a film featuring a shadowy, potentially terrorist “protagonist” being released a little over three months before 9/11?

• Did I mention Halle Berry? Did I mention Halle Berry in lingerie?

• The in media res opening scene with self-reflective, meta-cinema, philosophical discussion?

• A cameo appearance by William Gibson’s Neuromancer?

• Did I mention Halle Berry? Did I mention Halle Berry topless for the first time ever?

The film’s even managed to date pretty well and stay topically relevant, what with Jackman’s character trying to regain his daughter from his pornstar ex-wife. Not unlike a certain current day custody dispute.

Swordfish is definitely a piece of trash, but it’s intelligent enough to be a lot of smirky fun.

Arrrrgh! What a frustrating week of fantasy football. Hopefully this will be the nadir for the season.

For the first time this season, I had a losing week, going 1-3. Based upon projections I had two lock wins, one close loss, and one definite loss. The lock win I lost had a predicted spread of 57 POINTS in my favor. My team only scored 57 points total and lost by 36. Criminy.

Doom Patrol Prime was the underdog, but if there was potential for an upset this was the game. Well, none of my players overachieved. Meanwhile, for the second week in a row, my opponent had the week’s high score. What can you do.

Amazingly, this team is still in second place and a playoff berth. However, there are 8 teams within 1 game of the final three playoff spots. The stretch run will be interesting.

Doom Patrol Beta rolled. The team managed to survive Houston’s Steve Slaton getting benched early in his game and generating negative points. This team is 7 and 1, up 2 games in the loss column with 6 to play. Seems to be in good shape.

Another torturous defeat for Justice Society. Went down to the wire in the Monday night game, despite being a big underdog. Praying for the New Orleans to get a pick 6, a sack, a fumble, anything is not a winning position. Currently this team is way out of the playoffs and can’t seem to score enough to be viable. I’m just hoping not to wind up in the basement.

All I have to say about The New Mutants, is never trust secondary starters on medium to crap teams. This means you Jacksonville Jaguars. This fantasy team had a lousy three touchdowns total. At least my most painful bye week is over and I can get New England’s Tom Brady and Wes Welker back in the lineup. And somehow, this team is holding down the only wildcard playoff spot in the league. Go figure.

Now that I clearly know what the holes are in each team, I’m looking to do some trades. Hasn’t been any such activity in all four of the leagues I’m in, which seems sort of weird. I’ve got two offers out:

• Doom Patrol Prime: Hakeem Nicks and Joe Flacco for Knowshon Mareno and Visanthe Shiancoe

• Doom Patrol Beta: Jonathan Stewart for Brandon Marshall

Awaiting responses. Still hoping for that undefeated week.

Mark Pilgrim delves into the origin of HTML’s IMG tag. An entertaining read for Web geeks, but boy does that make me feel old. X Mosaic, Andrew, Intermedia, A/UX, NeXT, Display Postscript, HyTime, Linux on USENET, and Midas. Wow!! I was just two years into graduate school when this stuff was breaking out. I was familiar with a lot of these technologies because my adviser was into multimedia systems and my dissertation was eventually on programming language design for multimedia scripting. I was also an early Linux adopter.

Once again though, the late lamented NeWS graphical windowing system can’t get into the mix. Could have been Flash + JavaScript + Java before any of them. Just a bit too far ahead of its time.

A much better job of staying on task this month. There’s also a short blog entry for each of these books this month. Not exactly a review but a quick hit instant reaction.

• Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood. A scathing satire of humanity’s inhumanity, our relationship with nature, and the hubris of bioengineering. Both disturbing and hilarious, the novel is also cleverly plays with language.

• This Is Not A Game, Walter Jon Williams. Just a good solid thriller or piece of near-time speculative fiction depending upon your perspective. Not a classic in my book, but good old science fiction comfort food.

• Thirteen, Richard K. Morgan. Another alpha male mystery/odyssey from Morgan. Has some interesting themes, but also has a tough time standing up to the Takeshi Kovacs series.

• The Godfather, Mario Puzo. If you’re really into the movie version, then The Godfather is worth reading for some missing backstory. Otherwise, spend your time elsewhere.

After last month’s reading slowdown, I got reinvigorated and read more consistently. Four more down, makes for 30 completed on the year. Five more to complete the target reading goal for the year. Well within range.

So after probably hundreds of viewings of the movie version of The Godfather, I finally got around to reading Mario Puzo’s novel. Let’s just say it wasn’t good. Or I was really spoiled by Francis Ford Coppola’s production.

Frankly, the novel is basically a pretty lurid potboiler. While tons of people on Amazon love the book, I think Dick Schaap’s New York Times book review from 1969 hits the mark. (That Dick Shaap?) I actually thought he was making fun of the book, especially with this closing line, “Pick a night with nothing good on television, and you’ll come out far ahead.” It’s full of coarse sexuality and base violence. Some minor characters get way too much stage time to no good effect. And Puzo has a tendency to descend down into the weeds on given subjects. Luckily the actual story and accompanying narrative are pretty compelling.

The writing is AWFUL. I couldn’t tell if the overly long stretches of undistinguished exposition were worse than the horrible dialog. There were very few points where I disappeared into a scene and just felt the characters conversing with each other. I once had a creative writing teacher who pounded the mantra of “show, don’t tell”. Puzo does a lot of telling.

I will concede one point to Puzo though. His ending actually presents an even darker twist and would have made for an interesting cinematic finale.

If you’re a big fan of the movie the novel is still worth reading to get some more back story on a few characters. I could have done without the extra detail on Luca Brasi though. You’ll also be amazed at how closely the movie follows the book and how a great cast, screenplay, and director can pack so much drama and nuance into a few hours.

With a new release of my favorite application launcher, TidBITS throws LaunchBar some love. I learned a few things, both from the main article and the comments. Soon I’m going to try and start putting some of the clipboard capabilities to use.

So up until this weekend, I had been making some decent progress on my NodeBox hacking. While I’m not really looking to pick up a new tool, especially since I don’t really know the one I’ve got, I keep an eye out on happenings in the space.

The NodeBox folks are threatening to release NodeBox 2, a.k.a. Gravital, real soon now. Looks like it will use Jython for cross-platform support and a performance speedup. On the one one hand, speedups and access to lots of Java libraries (ala processing) is a good thing. On the other hand, the loss of numpy and its multidimensional array capabilities is a downer. Plus, Jython lags Cython a bit in language features.

Then there’s Field, essentially Gravital except it’s here now and it’s focused on live coding. Looks like it has pretty sophisticated audio and music capabilities. I’ll also have to snoop around and see what low level pixel pushing features it has.

Mass Programming Resistance is hosted on a little virtual private server. Recently my poor old server fell over. The disk filled up with spam and bounce notices from GMail. crossjam.net dropped off the net.

So I signed up for the Google Apps, Standard Edition and outsourced my e-mail server needs. Besides the spam deluge I was facing, I was mostly motivated by Gina Trapani documenting the ease with which the whole thing could be set up. She’s also got a deeper dive into how to configure Google Apps for Your Domain.

So far so good, but I need to jerry rig a way to forward my good e-mail out of GMail and into my own server as a mail backup mechanism.

Grumble. This week my teams went a frustrating 2 and 2. It’s almost enough to make me not care. The real travesty was having to rely on the Redskins against the Eagles. Guaranteed disappointment.

Three out of four teams are solid winners, currently holding fantasy playoff spots.

And then there’s Justice Society.

More after the break.

Doom Patrol was a slight underdog. The opponent went for 142 points, highest total in the league this year. Tough to beat a guy when four out of his eight players total 109 points. Still tied for second in the league, and ahead on point total.

Doom Patrol Beta rolled, although there was still room for a collapse going into the Monday night game. Luckily the Eagles Donovan McNabb didn’t explode. Meanwhile, I had the Eagles defense which whaled on the hapless Redskins. I’m holding sole possession of first place in this league.

The New Mutants of the NFL.com league pushed out to a big early lead and then won by a comfortable 16 points. I think I’m still in the playoffs with this team.

My ESPN league team, Justice Society, endured the most painful loss I’ve ever suffered in fantasy football. Going into Monday night, I had a 26 point lead. The team was facing the Eagles defense and the Eagles LeSean McCoy, a backup running back. So of course the starting running back, Brian Westbrook, gets hurt giving McCoy plenty of opportunity to rack up points. Still he had a mild day, scoring 6 points.

Of course the Eagles D goes for 21, giving me a brutal 1 point loss. Even worse is that as I watched the real time scoring tracker, after they achieved their 6th sack I was down by one and resigned to a loss. Then the ‘Skins drove for a garbage touchdown which took three off their score. McCoy added another fantasy point before the end of the game. I went to bed thinking I had won.

Wake up in the morning, and the official scorer had awarded the Eagles defense with another fumble recovery. 2 more fantasy points and I lose.

The fantasy gods giveth. The fantasy gods taketh away.

I finished Richard K. Morgan’s Thirteen last week. Being an unabashed Morgan fan, this one had been on my list for a while. Unfortunately, Thirteen despite being quite ambitious is a little disappointing.

The major reason for disappointment is the fact that Carl Marsalis, the main character, feels a lot like Takeshi Kovacs, the protagonist of Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies. He also shares a lot of alpha-male tendencies with Chris Faulkner, the lead of Market Forces. If I didn’t know better I’d call Thirteen an Altered Carbon prequel, modulo the former’s romantic thread. Marsalis is genetically altered, psychotically mean, and military-grade lethal maneuvered into a violent journey of mystery and revenge.

Thirteen is set a little closer to our own times, so Morgan takes the opportunity to unload upon the good old US of A. In his world, the federal government has collapsed, leaving a Northeastern Union, Pacific Rim federation, and the rest a Republic, commonly referred to as Jesusland. Needless to say the worst tendencies of conservative Christianity emerge once the holy rollers get to run a nation. We also get a good bit more of a female perspective then Morgan’s other books, including some perspective from a complex, Marsalis love interest of Turkish-American descent.

Stuck in a Florida jail early in the story Marsalis is freed to hunt down a similarly genetically modified “thirteen variant”, with seeming connections to Jesusland. Here Morgan digs into the nasty racial underbelly of the US. Then the whole political angle essentially fizzles. I honestly think that as a Brit, Morgan didn’t have a deep wellspring of American culture to draw from and flesh out the story from that perspective, falling back into a comfortable internationalized mult-culti zone. There’s only so much you can get from reading about and visiting America. I was expecting some serious clash of civilizations and cultures, with American exceptionalism at the center, but that’s not the direction Morgan took.

Don’t get me wrong, Thirteen is a good read, but I would have preferred 500 more pages of Takeshi Kovacs.

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.

So by the looks of my current postings, fantasy football might be the only thing I do care about, even though I know you don’t. Rest assured, I’ll return to some other regularly scheduled programming shortly.

In this week’s episode, I go 3-1 and every team is now at .500 or better. Even my worst teams are still in the muck for a fantasy playoff spot.

I was still disappointed.

Way too long analysis after the break. Non-fantasy heads can stop here.

Despite winning a matchup I thought I was going to lose, I was disappointed that I lost a match I thought I was going to win. Mainly because it was my sole undefeated team. Oh well!

Doom Patrol Prime was a slight underdog, but I was feeling pretty good. For whatever reason, the Yahoo! projection algorithm typically undervalues New Orleans’ Drew Brees by a touchdown. Needles to say when he lit up the Giants in the first half my confidence went up. This team also has New England’s Randy Moss, beneficiary of 3 of Tom Brady’s 6 touchdown passes. Two guy’s going for 30+ points apiece makes for a short path to victory.

Interestingly, this team is in sole possession of second place despite a horrible draft. I missed the first two picks but had done my own rankings so I wound up with Drew Brees and Randy Moss. Then I started picking: Darren McFadden, Marshawn Lynch, Eddie Royal, Matt Hasselbeck, Jamal Lewis, Visanthe Shiancoe, Washington DEF and Hakeem Nicks. Only Marshawn Lynch remains and he’s only played one game. Some of those guys contributed here and there, but that’s pretty pathetic. I did pick up Ahmad Bradshaw and Donald Driver late and they’ve been good supporting mainstays. Combined with Brees and Moss I’ve got a solid core and have been working the waiver wire like a champ.

Doom Patrol Beta, formerly undefeated, was a solid favorite. Three of my guys underperformed, including the Cardinals’ disappointing Anquan Boldin. I’m about to hit the panic button on him. Meanwhile, six of the opposing team’s players overperformed, including the Jag’s Maurice Jones-Drew for 30+. Ball game. Still tied for first in this league, although I lose the tie break.

In the ESPN League, Justice Society has crawled back to 3-3. The Panthers’ DeAngelo Williams did the main damage. Two nice waiver pickups, the Broncos D/ST and tight end Tony Scheffler, were also big contributors.

In this league, there’s one 5-1 team, one 1-5 team, and everyone else is 3-3. For whatever reason I hold a divisional tie break, so I’m actually second in the division. Good enough for the third playoff seed. Surprising given my poor draft position for this team.

The New Mutants of the NFL.com league were favorites. By the end of the 1 o’clock games I was down by 20 points and nervous. At the end of 4 PM first quarter, the gap was widening. Then Tom Brady and Wes Welker went to work. By the end of the 4PM first half, I was up by 40. In about a 30 minute span, wall clock time, I went from around 60 points to 110 points. My opponent only had 1 remaining Monday night player, and he wasn’t making up those 40 points.

This team has a slim lead, on a points tie breaker, for the sole wild card playoff spot. However, my team is shaping up to be pretty strong down the stretch. Despite having the only current undefeated team in my division, there’s still a chance I could win it.

In all of the leagues, this upcoming week is essentially the half way mark of the season. I feel like I’m in good position with three teams and have a fighting chance with the fourth to make the playoffs

But I’d only bet my own money that one of the four will make it. It’s fantasy football, anything can happen!

This fantasy football (still don’t care don’t you) report will be short and sweet since I seem to be going under the weather.

My teams went 3-1 this week. Both Yahoo! league teams won and are still leading or near the lead of the leagues. Out of 10 games they have one loss between them. This was also one of the more hazardous weeks, because both of their #1 quarterbacks, New Orleans’ Drew Brees and Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers, were on bye. Now a prime scoring position is locked in, barring injury as they say.

The ESPN league team rolled to a victory. Houston’s Andre Johnson finally had a really big day and I got a surprisingly productive performance out of New York’s Ahmad Bradshaw. Arizona’s Anquan Boldin is starting to make me nervous, especially since I turned down a trade for him. Let’s see if I can eke out back-to-back wins with this team.

I’m embarrased to say I lost my NFL.com game against an owner who started two players on bye. My team had some insanely poor underperformers including the Browns’ Jerome Harrison, the Colts’ Pierre Garcon, and the Jaguars’ Mike Sims-Wakler. Worse, I had enough points on the bench to win this game.

Still fiending for that undefeated week.

So I’ve actually been making some good progress on converting Jared Tarbell’s substrate processing sketch to NodeBox. Functionally, I think I’ve got an implementation that’s pretty close to an equivalent. Unfortunately, it lacks a little in the performance department.

I so want to play blame low level pixel twiddling and bit blitting in NodeBox, but really need to more carefully investigate. There’s one or two other potential culprits.

But this is turning into a fun little side project.

So I was stuck wandering around my local library last week, looking for a book to start reading. Now our library is new, but it’s not chock full of SF which is what I was looking for. Plus, all the fiction is shelved together, not by genre. I was just about to give up and lose the reading habit for a few days, when I trolled the W’s. Walter Jon Williams This Is Not A Game caught my eye, remembrances of an io9 review surfacing. So I grabbed the book and checked it out.

This Is Not A Game turned out to be pretty good. I didn’t find it particularly deep but it was a well written, easy to read, bit of near team speculative fiction. The plot focuses on the bleed between Alternate Reality Games and the real world, wrapped around a murder mystery. As Paul Raven pointed out the book could easily be classified as a technothriller. I particularly sympathize with Raven’s expectations of a big reveal at the end. I was waiting for one as well. A reveal that never arrived.

My only major problem was with Dagmar’s, the main character, walk moment. At a certain point she has to make a decision to meet her bosses crazy demands or quit her job. Previously she had been made out as fairly wealthy if not quite rich, drafting off of her successful college chums. Yet at decision time Dagmar mumbles something about needing the money. This bugged me the rest of the book, especially since she didn’t seem to have any real financial commitments. No mortgage, well past college loans, no child support, no extravagant LA lifestyle. Plus there were plenty of other rationalizations she could have come up with. Just a minor glitch though.

And Williams overdid it a bit with the “Harlem Nocturne” ringtone mentions.

In any event, worth a library loan or a paperback pickup, whenever it makes it to paperback.

One of the mysteries of the substrate sketch is an image from which the visualization’s color palette is derived. Named pollockShimmering.gif in the sketch source code, I couldn’t actually find the image.

Turns out the GitHub repository for processing.js has the image stashed away. processing.js is a port of processing to JavaScript by John Resig. substrate was one of the sketches Resig ported to processing.js to demonstrate a certain level of compatibility with processing. The whole project also demonstrates the viability of JavaScript in the browser as an aesthetic visualization platform.

What’s the big deal about finding one little ole gif file? As I work to convert sketches from processing to NodeBox, I think it’s important to get as close as possible to the original results. This demonstrates understanding of the processing sketch and proficiency using NodeBox. Without this data, it would have been hard to do for substrate.

Besides, I like solving mysteries.

Fantasy frustration was the order of the weekend. I went 2-2, but really only had one satisfying game. One good blowout win to stay undefeated. Two close losses where I let playing matchups bite me in the butt. Plus one win over an absentee owner.

More after the break

Doom Patrol Prime fell into a five way tie for first, after I lost by only 1.7 points. The killer is that I played Oakland’s Darren McFadden in what I swore would be his last game for me. I was hoping he could do something against Houston’s (previously) hapless defense. McFadden effectively put up a goose egg. Meanwhile, I sat Dallas’ Tashard Coice, who generated a solid 10 points. Ball game.

Frankly, I probably shouldn’t have been in that game though. New Orleans’ Drew Brees was way under projection. The San Francisco defense bailed me out however, way overperforming and exploding for 39 points.

Doom Patrol Beta rolled, winning by 39 points. The real Steve Slaton (Houston) showed up, Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers had a big Monday Night, and I had the San Fran defense again. Still undefeated and tied for first. ‘Nuff said.

Justice Society failed to come through again. Lost by 9, with McFadden doing damage for a second time. Sigh.

The New Mutants won despite only scoring 71 points. Tom Brady was the singular player to reach the endzone. Given the rules of this league, it’s hard to win on yardage alone. Meanwhile, the other owner played 4 players on bye. I’m guessing he’s not even paying attention to this league anymore.

For some reason, Jared Tarbell’s work has stuck with me even thought I’ve never done any Flash programming or generative art. At Complexification, he has a beautiful collection of processing sketches. Even though they’re for an older version of processing, converting them to NodeBox

Looking at Tarbell’s open source Flash works some of those might also translate nicely as well.

Image cribbed from the substrate sketch on complexification.net

From Top 10 to Top None in the space of a week plus a day. That’s what happens when you only score three points for the second week in a row. USC just laid the beatdown on the poor Bears this past Saturday.

Things don’t get any easier either, with a road game at UCLA. The Bruins are half decent this year.

Given that the potential to shutdown Jahvid Best has been definitively demonstrated, the Bears just need to find something upon which they can build. Simply being productive on offense next week would be a step forward.

Jiminy! They’ll probably be underdogs for The Big Game. That’s looking like our bowl game for this year.

Yesterday I finished Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Wow was that a great read! Simultaneously disturbing in the highly possible inhumanity and hubris on display yet delightful in the language play and satire. Oryx and Crake was one of the few books I’ve read recently that had laugh out loud moments.

If for nothing else, the book is worth reading for Atwood’s carefully crafted and targeted neologisms and corporate names. HealthWyzer. Pigoons. AnooYoo. Rakunks. CorpSeCorps. Wolvogs. Independent of their cuteness, in the context of the novel, they serve to thoroughly skewer our own current condition. I’ll never be able to think of Chicken Nuggets as anything other than Chicken Nobbies from here on out.

If processing can have a library for the Echo Nest API, then it shouldn’t be too hard to do one for NodeBox. Conveniently, the Python library for the Echo Nest API is maintained by the Echo Nest itself.

‘Twould make for an interesting combination.

• Making Money, Terry Pratchett. A satisfying sequel to Going Postal, although a bit too frenetic with an overabundance of characters. A few get short shrifted and could easily have been cut. Looking forward to Moist von Lipwig’s next misadventures.

• Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson. Rounds out my reread of the Sprawl trilogy. Not quite as tight or engaging as Neuromancer or Count Zero but definitely a good read.

• Life, Inc Douglas Rushkoff. Disappointing, given that I had been predisposed to liking the book. I bought most of Rushkoff’s central arguments about modern finance and how it extracts from communities. However, this went on a little too long, at the expense of a deeper discussion of potential solutions. Also, using endnotes with no inline marker made the book come off as 200 pages of diatribe through assertion, followed by about 30 pages of thinly supported response. Still worth reading though.

Bit of a let down reading this month. Not the books’ fault, but I finished Making Money and Mona Lisa Overdrive during the Labor Day holiday. Visions of completing six books in September were dancing in my head, but obviously I fell short. Life, Inc. really bogged me down, then I lost some commute reading time to work travel.

26 down for the year though. 35 still in sight.

Posted on 28 out of 30 days in September. I just ran out of gas on the days I missed and fell asleep before I could get to posting. Life intrudes.

I’m going to pursue NodeBox hacking as a 100 hours project, shooting for about 8 hours per week on average, from here to the end of the year. I’ll probably use a Posterous site just as an activity log, but that should provide more technical grist for this blog.

Posting about football has been a hoot! I’m definitely going to keep that up.

You know the drill. You don’t care, but I’m gonna do it anyway.

The skinny. I went 3-1 over the weekend. My two editions of Doom Patrol are undefeated, tied for first, and looking pretty solid. With some judicious free agent pickups, my NFL.com team is now looking pretty strong. As predicted, Justice Society is giving me a hard time, losing again.

More after the break

Fantasy football starts to get tricky this week in that real teams are starting to have bye weeks. So some of my fantasy players might not actually be playing.

If you’re lucky, you’ve got a bench stocked with capable subs. However, some positions, like tight end and defense, you just don’t bother. In some leagues, you just don’t have a lot of bench space, so you have to carefully consider how you’ll fill in for a week.

This is also the time of year where fantasy undrafted guys who wind up making a big difference start to emerge. I’m making a big push in many of my leagues to get Pierre Garcon, the #2 receiver of Peyton Manning, and an emerging productive player. Due to injuries to the Cowboys Marion Barber and Felix Jones, Tashard Choice may suddenly be a #1 back on a solid to good team. I scooped him up over the past weekend.

Justice Society is the only downer. This team doesn’t really have any no-brainer, explosive players who’ll get 20+ fantasy points on a regular basis. So I have to guess at favorable matchups, which is a bit of a crapshoot. I’m contemplating experimenting with trades for this team. Trading hasn’t been a favored activity in my previous fantasy systems. If this team ends up with a winning record I’ll be surprised.

espalier |iˈspalyər; -yā| noun

• a fruit tree or ornamental shrub whose branches are trained to grow flat against a wall, supported on a lattice or a framework of stakes.

• a lattice or framework of this type.

verb [ trans. ]

train (a tree or shrub) in such a way.

Ran across this one reading Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. I don’t think I’ve seen that word EVER in my life, until today.

I’ve been doing a little more thinking about decentalized, Web scale, publish/subscribe, a.k.a the PushButton Web. Often “realtime” is used in conjunction with this term which is a bit of a red herring.

First, most PushButton Web advocates are savvy enough to realize that TCP, and HTTP on top of it, in no way have realtime guarantees. TCP explictly trades realtime for reliable delivery.

Which leads to my second point. The underlying goal of all this Web style decentralization is to remove a single point of failure, Twitter, and increase reliability of tweet delivery.

This epiphany came to me partially because all the Web fantasy football leagues I’m in provide “realtime” scoring tools. Yahoo!’s scoreboard goes a bit hinky from time to time, but they’re all updated remarkably quickly, typically within seconds of a play’s conclusion. I don’t know exactly how many users have these tools up at any given time but if it’s even a small percentage of league participants that’s probably still a big number. So if realtime is that big a deal, there are tools and techniques in existence to build upon.

I also had a hard time coming up with a compelling use case for realtime tweets or other web notifications. Then again, I may just not have enough vision, as I’m definitely NOT a hardcore, full time, always on, Twitter user.

If a pretty good, best effort, Web scale, Web style, pub/sub infrastructure emerges, without any real “realtime”, that’s still a good thing.

Just thinking out loud.

I said before this would be the make or break stretch for the Cal Bears. So did a lot of other people.

Consider the season broken. Oregon 42, Cal 3. And in such embarrassing fashion to boot!

Even if they somehow beat the Trojans next week, they’ll still need the Ducks to stumble twice. Plus hope no one else goes undefeated in the Pac-10, fairly likely. And the Bears have to not trip up again themselves, a tall order.

Still have The Big Game to look forward too though.

Speaking of Ken MacLeod, an author who has recently emerged as a favorite of mine, looks like he recently started a blog entitled: The Earlier Days of a Better Nation.

Okay, so I think I found one task for NodeBox that there doesn’t exist a good solution for. Seems like there’s minimal support for audio encoding, decoding, and playback.

Between NodeBox and Python, access seems tantalizingly close. NodeBox has a Quicktime library, which lets you get video frames out of a QuickTime movie, but not any of the audio data. I’m now looking at Python audio modules, but there doesn’t seem to be much that’s mature and works on MacOS X.

We’ll see though, as I’ve been known to be wrong.