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