Running across Matchure gave me good vibes regarding the utility of pattern matching in higher order programming languages. Pattern matching is still an undervalued mechanism in modern programming. A kissing cousin of Lisp macros, pattern matching is a nice high-level way to express tree structure matching and binding of matched substructure to variables. It’s simultaneously easy to decompose structures and immediately compute over the decomposition. Similar to regular expressions over strings, functional style patterns tend to look like the structures they’re trying to match.

I have a soft spot for pattern matching because in my dissertation I suggested that they would be a powerful addition to multimedia scripting languages, especially languages embedded in Web browsers. The pattern matching would be handy for dealing with the tree structure of HTML pages.

I was both wrong and right. Functional style pattern matching never did wind up in the browser. But XPath in JavaScript bears witness that tree destructuring is actually pretty useful. Every language could seemingly use pattern matching, but it’s exceedingly hard to embed in languages with Algol-style syntax.

It’s been a pretty full buffet of NBA playoff action the past couple of days. Thursday and Friday showcased three games. This weekend we got four games on Saturday and four more on Sunday. The only downside for me is that most of the good games have been the Western Conference late nighters. I’m an early riser these days, so typically don’t make it past the first quarter, if that, of those games.

Some quick observations:

• Thought Miami was going to give the Celtics some trouble, but the C’s have demonstrated much better winnin’ time experience.

• The Lakers are in a little bit of trouble. A couple of bad bounces here or there, or an inconvenient injury, and they could be put out by the OKC Thunder. Kevin Durant, The Slim Assassin (TM).

• I don’t know how the Utah Jazz are doing it against the Denver Nuggets. George Karl taking a leave for cancer treatment seems to have really put the Nuggets off kilter. Going into the playoffs I thought Denver was the only team with a chance to take out the Lakers. Now I’m not so sure about either the Lakers or the Nuggets.

• Suns vs Trail Blazers seems like the most fun series going.

• The Bulls just don’t have the talent to stay with the Cavs. Hope that free agent thing works out for the Bulls this off season.

Oh, and living near the nation’s capital I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Stanley Cup playoffs. Rock the Red! Ovechkin and the Capitals are stringing out this series with the Canadiens a little longer than necessary, but I’m pretty sure they’ll get the job done. I stupidly dipped out of yesterday’s Chicago/Nashville game, right after Hossa got his penalty, thinking the game was over.

Another really useful Dashboard widget is Deep Sleep, which allows you to easily send your Mac into a power saving hibernation. Ed Hunsinger has the best explanation of Mac sleep modes that I’ve seen so far.

The nice thing about Deep Sleep is that it can supplement your default suspend activity for when a Mac laptop lid is closed. You can have the close go to the basic “sleep” mode and clicking on the widget lead to a “hibernate”. Very handy.

And the Deep Sleep widget is free to boot.

The fine folks at Bjango have updated iStat Menus. There’s a whole raftload of improvements and fixes for my favorite Macintosh status monitoring tool. Unobtrusively located in my menu bar, iStat menus does its job efficiently and quietly.

Two of the major changes appear to be that first iStat Menus is no long donationware. If you want a license, ante up $10. Second, instead of a preference pane, configuration is now done through a full fledged application. Seems reasonable to me, although over at Macworld, a few folks seem upset.

Also, even though it looks abandoned, iStat Pro is a nice Dashboard widget version of the monitors in iStat Menus.

I’ve been following [DJ Mark Farina’s Twitter stream][2] and it’s been pretty entertaining. Poor guy went over to Dubai, then Europe, and got stuck on the continent thanks to the volcano eruption. Had to come back to SF via Munich to Rome to NYC. Then on his next trip out, to gig in El Paso, TX, he gets stuck in Denver due to tornados!! Poor guy. He also dropped a tweet on this recent [interview][1] he did with [Radio4by4][3] *(music autoplay warning)*. This may be the first time I’ve actually seen or heard an interview with him. A little softspoken, but interesting stuff about his new label, Great Lakes Audio; EP, Geograffiti; and the Winter Music Conference. Best of all he said three words that are music to my ears… **Mushroom Jazz 7**, Looking like a Fall drop for North America. I’m all over it. [1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD_Tgkn3MAw [2]: http://twitter.com/djmarkfarina [3]: http://www.radio4by4.com/

Still searching for the perfect desktop search application on the Mac, I ran across Alfred. Relatively new, released on Feb 28th 2010, Alfred seems more oriented towards quick launching of applications. Sort of square in the LaunchBar, Quicksilver, Google Quick Search Box arena. Initial reviews highlight that Alfred’s main goal is to be simpler and faster than those alternatives.

Well I’m pretty happy LaunchBar, but I thought I’d log Alfred here just for future reference. Still searching for search on the Mac.

Gang Starr, was definitely a distinctive part of the late 80’s-early 90’s, positive hip hop movement. Besides DJ Premier’s great mixing and cutting, Guru (seen at right in the adjacent photo) had both a unique lyrical style and unique vocal sound. Together Guru and Premier epitomized the intersection of Hip-Hop and Jazz.

Herewith, some of their best tracks:

• Words I Manifest

• Jazz Thing

• Who’s Gonna Take The Weight? (I was raised like a Muslim / Prayin’ to the East)

• Step In The Arena

• DWYCK (Leaving the bodega I say suave / Premier’s got more beats than barns got hay)

• Take It Personal

• Mass Appeal

Guru has passed on, after a long battle with cancer. He was my age. His death, along with Malcolm McLaren’s, seems like the beginning of the end for an era of Hip-Hop that highly influenced me. An era before pimps and hoes, n*s and b*s, ghetto fabulous and bling, took over the main stage. An era when Hip-Hop held a little more dignity for the Black man.

Godspeed kind sir.

And whatever this beef is between Guru, Solar, and Premier, it’s whack! Kill the noise.

Spoke too soon about the death of the writer’s advice posts that io9’s Charlie Jane Anders had been delivering. A new one popped up today with a list of 4 basic writing tips. I find it hard to believe that anyone seriously aspiring to be published didn’t already know these basic hints for avoiding lifeless, limp writing.

What do I know though? The post seems to be attracting a decent number of views and comments, at least relative to some other posts currently on the front page. I guess there must be plenty of wannabe authors in the io9 audience.

Color me skeptical, but…

Ridley Scott directing a version of Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War might actually turn out halfway decent. Agent Orange’s post on io9 would intimate that this might happen. A little better sourcing would be helpful though.

One can dream can’t they.

Previously I had mentioned that I was “fiending for some NBA playoff action”. Well the playoffs are here and I’ve got a veritable cornucopia of NBA with 4 games today and 4 tomorrow. The first couple of games, Eastern Conference I might add, were duds. The Cavs smoked, then coasted on, the Bulls. Meanwhile, the Hawks ran away from the Bucks. I don’t expect much out of either of those series, but the Heat might give the Celtics some heartburn. They’ve been leading for most of the game in Boston.

But there’s also the NHL playoffs getting started too. The Washington Capitals being the only winning team in the DC area, and the best regular season team in the NHL, are generating a lot of excitement. They slipped up in game one of their series with Les Habitants, but game 2 was a roller coaster, overtime thriller victory. Forget Ovie, Backstrom is the man. Rock the red!!

A late comer to hockey, I’ve finally figured out at least one of the really distinguishing feature of the game. In many other sports, the game slows down at the end. Football? Get out of bounds, throw an incompletion, spike the ball, the clock stops. Basketball? Foul or call timeouts to extend the game. Baseball? Keep bringing in relievers or keep fouling it off until that 27th out. In hockey, due to continuous play and limited time outs, it’s hard to slow the game down. So the players work harder, faster, and with more desperation in the amount of time remaining. A hockey game accelerates at the end, a refreshing change from other sports.

Ran across Joost de Valk’s Quix, a bookmarklet that pops up a dialog box and then provides a bevy of commands that work within the context of the current browser page. Plus it’s extensible with your own commands.

Quix is an extensible bookmarklet, that allows you to easily access all your bookmarks and bookmarklets, across all your browsers, while maintaining them in only one spot. All you have to do is remember the shortcut for the bookmarklet, so, basically, it’s like a command line for your browser

Quix reminds me of the currently napping Mozilla Ubiquity experiment, which put the command line right in the browser’s URL bar. If I wasn’t so into LaunchBar as my command launcher, I’d probably really dig into one of these command line in a browser extensions. While I’m sure Quix and Ubiquity are good for running macro style one-liners, I’d be interested to see what a real browser shell language looked like. Sort of how Shivers describes the UNIX shell languages.

Unix shells, such as sh or csh, provide two things at once: an interactive command language and a programming language. Let us focus on the latter function: the writing of “shell scripts” — interpreted programs that perform small tasks or assemble a collection of Unix tools into a single application.

Unix shells are real programming languages. They have variables, if/then conditionals, and loops. But they are terrible programming languages. The data structures typically consist only of integers and vectors of strings. The facilities for procedural abstraction are non-existent to minimal. The lexical and syntactic structures are multi-phased, unprincipled, and baroque.

Scheme for driving a browser. Hmmmm. Now there’s a language design I’d like to see.

Via MetaFilter

Now this is the kind of content I really enjoy from io9. A nice, in-depth review, by Charlie Jane Anders, of Ian McEwan’s book Solar. Solar, a tale of a physics anti-hero that’s part speculative fiction, part satire, and from a literary star seems right up my alley, cf. Margaret Atwood.

The problem for me is that Solar is currently only available in hardback. I’m really avoiding those editions these days due to the bulk. No, I don’t have or lust for a Kindle or iPad. I’ll be waiting for a trade paperback version, which we might never get here in the US.

P. S. I wish Anders could spend more time on book reviews, as opposed to all the other electronic media related posts she generates. At least that ill-fated writing advice theme bit the dust. Too inside baseball.

As someone who has adorned his MacBook with a number of stickers, and a long time fan of the free software movement, I wholly endorse the open source sticker campaign. openstickers.com is a free as in beer and free as in freedom collection of images that you can print on adhesive paper, cut out, and stick wherever you like.

Now where do I get adhesive photographic paper?

In the continuing effort to ramp up my Drum ‘N Bass experience, I’ve been really enjoying Dieselboy’s The Human Resource. The mix from this CD doesn’t have quite the highs (or lows) of The Dungeonmaster’s Guide but it’s really consistent high energy DnB. Technically mixed by Evol Intent, highlights include Styles of Beyond’s Subculture, Evol Intent + Ewun’s The Rapture, and Dieselboy + Technical Itch on Atlantic State (Gridlok Remix).

Just a good, hard, dark, twisty ride over some rugged beats and some nasty synth lines. Gets the feet tappin’ and the head noddin’

I spent the better part of eight plus years in the great city of Chicago. I had a lot of Chicago style hot dogs while I was there and enjoyed 90% of them. I got to a lot of the iconic hot dog places around the city. The Wiener’s Circle (for a late night harangue no less), Chicago Dog, Portillo’s, Gold Coast, Maxwell Street, etc. Hot Doug’s closed before I could get to it and I never did make it to Superdawg.

So it is with great pleasure that I discovered Windy City Red Hots, right here in Loudoun County, VA. Living in Loudoun means driving up and down Route 7, past a flower nursery where the Windy City truck is parked. For the longest time I thought this had to be a sad, cruel joke, so I didn’t make time to stop and check it out.

Boy was I wrong! These guys are legit. I’ve only had a Polish, but it looked, smelled, and tasted straight from a Chicago city block party. They’ve also got red hots, Italian beef, and pizza puffs (?!?!). The Washington Post has a good article on Windy City Red Hots. Sorry, if it’s behind a pay wall. Now if they’d only add a small selection of brats, I’d be in heaven. Highly recommended and I plan on giving them my regular patronage.

I have to admit though, I’m a bit of a heretic. I like ketchup on my dogs. Sue me.

Sky1 is doing an adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s book Going Postal. I quite enjoyed the adventures of Moist von Lipwig and maybe one day I’ll get to see this production. I noticed from the trailer though a lack of von Lipwig’s gold suit. What gives?

Ran across this word while reading David Denby’s excellent review of Clint Eastwood’s career. Was instantly struck by a certain elegance and the clear Latin root.

inamorata, via Wiktionary

1. n., \in-am-uh-RAH-tuh\, a female lover or love interest

Seems like a word apropos of Elle Driver’s fetish for gargantuan.

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

Missed the news that Many Tricks released a new version of Witch. Witch is an add-on/replacement keyboard driven window switcher for Mac OS X. Along with Launchbar, Witch is ingrained as part of my Mac muscle memory.

Dan Moren at Macworld provides a compact overview of Witch’s new features, while the Witch homepage has more details. One nice thing is the ability to override the built-in Command-H tab switcher, which I still use way too frequently. I also learned a lot of command switching tips, which Witch now emulates as well.

Looks like I’ll have to pay $8 for the upgrade, but I’m sure it’ll be well worth the cost.

…go ‘round the outside, ‘round the outside, ‘round the outside. … Four buffalo gals go ‘round the outside and do-si-do your partner!

In the wake of his passing, the obituaries rightly focus on Malcolm McLaren’s work with the Sex Pistols. But I remember at my earliest infatuation with Hip-Hop, digging through the bins in a Boston record store (probably Tower or Newbury Records), and picking up Dya Like Scratchin on a whim, just because the jacket “looked” Hip-Hop.

The little mini-album was a trove of early rappin’, cuttin’, and scratchin’. Buffalo Gals is an iconic piece of early Hip-Hop, but I’ll always have a soft spot for World’s Famous (and A Tribe Called Quest’s homage Award Tour). Malcolm McLaren might have been the first white rapper to take the form seriously and actually pull it off.

McLaren wasn’t a giant of Hip-Hop, but his small slice was a seminal contribution. Godspeed kind sir.

Well, io9 is still good for something. Thanks to Annalee Newitz I found out that William Gibson is coming out with a new book entitled Zero History. Looks like it’ll be some sort of continuation of the themes in Pattern Recognition and Spook Country.

I’m in the tank for Gibson so I’m eagerly looking forward to Zero History, although Spook Country did let me down. Instead of springing for the Zero History hardback, I may wait for the paperback. Or better yet, borrow it from my local library.

If you use Python you should be using virtualenv. If you’re using virtualenv you should be using virtualenvwrapper.

The gist is that virtualenv creates clean, custom Python installations where you can muck up the installed extensions without messing up the global system wide install. virtualenvwrapper better integrates these virtual environments with your shell command line, among other things. Ultimately you can easily flow between various “versions” of Python with all sorts of weird extensions, without wrecking a default installation. And virtualenvwrapper is pluggable. So if you don’t like how it works, or want something it doesn’t do, you can fix it.

Doug Hellman, virtualenvwrapper‘s author, recently cut loose a major new release. Go get it.

That is all!

Wow! That was a great 2010 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship game. I really thought Butler was going to be crushed due to Duke’s size, but the Bulldog’s defense was surprisingly effective. I’ve been watching Final Fours since 1977 and the two Butler games rank right up there for drama. Yeah, Butler was highly ranked to start the year, but they were still underdogs.

Meanwhile, I’ve been dipping into the NCAA Women’s Basketball tournament to see with my own eyes how dominant the UConn Huskies really are. All I can say is that they are as good as advertised. Maya Moore is a stone cold assassin. I’m actually stoked to watch the ladies championship because it will be historic either way. (As of this writing UConn is ice cold, and Stanford’s not looking scared.)

Mark my words, if UConn wins their 78th game in a row, and second championship in a row, they’ll reach 100 in a row.

Regarding Chrome and 1Password, I’m using the combination increasingly and things seem to be going fine. One minor nit is that 1Password can’t seem to autologin. It’ll fill in the username and password fields, but won’t hit the login button. Not a big deal.

On that Mac OS X DNS issue, so far so good. Haven’t seen my machine get confused about local IP addresses over the past week.

Choosy is not seeing much use. Might be slated for removal.

I’m going on record here that despite my slow start, I’ll finish reading 30 books this year. That’ll be the third straight year.

Over at my mother’s house, I found a box of old paperbacks, mainly my collection of fantasy novels gathered during my teen years. They’re in pretty good shape. The core looks to be Michael Moorcock, especially Elric, Robert E. Howard’s Conan, and Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

I was struggling with stocking a supply of paperbacks to read during my commute. I don’t mind going to the library, but the handy branches don’t really carry a decent selection of paperbacks. Meanwhile, hardbacks are too bulky. And for whatever reason, used bookstores are few and far between. This newly discovered box neatly solves that problem.

I’ve already written about revisiting Conan and going back to Nehwon. For the former, I expect further books in the series to be about the same. Good stuff from Howard, pastiche from the other authors. Similarly, I expect Leiber to be consistently entertaining and well written.

Moorcock should be interesting. I probably wasn’t sophisticated enough to truly comprehend the anti-hero themes of Elric. Let’s see how it reads with time, maturity, and sophistication.

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!