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.

The image capture to the right is the result of my building the Python Imaging Library such that it can be imported within NodeBox. Basically I’m showing that the module can be imported, used to load an image, and that image can be turned into a Numpy array. Remember, this was going to be a little personal achievement.

Well, just like last time, I learned that NodeBox already has the capability I was looking for. NodeBox has not one, but two, image processing extension libraries. The first is PhotoBot, which is essentially PIL 1.1.4 for NodeBox, and deprecated. So while I was ignorant at least it was ignorance of dusty old code that would have need some revival effort.

The second library, Core Image, is a direct poke in the eye. A MacOS only extension, it uses the os’s built-in image processing facilities. Core Image provides an object model similar to PhotoShop’s where an image is built out of layers that can be individually processed and collectively composited. Since the image processing code is a part of the os, and presumably heavily used, it’s been highly optimized AND should take advantage of any GPU speed boosts.

Basically, Core Image looks like what I was looking for if I had only looked a little more carefully.

No worries though. This is all about spare time hacking and learning.

This review of Greg Egan’s Oceanic, appearing on the New Scientist website, makes the book sound very tempting. Then again, I’m still recovering from the head explosion induced by the last Egan book I read, Diaspora.

Oceanic is also a short story collection, which I’m disinclined to read. But I’m parking the link here as a note for future consideration.

The review appeared in a special issue of New Scientist, the fiction of now which has a cute little piece of flash fiction from Ken MacLeod, amongst a lot other good nibbles.

Retconned for typos.

You still don’t care about my fantasy football teams and I’m still writing about them.

In this week’s update, I went 3 and 1. My two Yahoo teams are undefeated. My ESPN team put together a solid win. The NFL.com team got whacked, but I left about 40 points on the bench, attempting to play a few matchups. That team also is overloaded on Cowboys, so I need to add some diversity.

A little bit more detail after the break

For Doom Patrol, I thought I was gonna run away with it, after Drew Brees went off and the New Orleans defense actually provided some punch. But my opponent closed a bit and I had to sweat out the Sunday night game. Brandon Jacobs was playing in opposition and he could have had a big night. Luckily he was basically shut down.

Doom Patrol, B-League benefited from explosive performances from San Francisco’s Frank Gore (200+ yards and 2 TDs) and San Diego’s Vincent Jackson (141 yards and 1 TD). Not to mention workmanlike efforts from Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers and Minnesota’s Percy Harvin. Plus I left 18 points on the bench with Indy’s Dallas Clark.

However, I did play Dallas Clark to good effect in my ESPN league. Andre Johnson exploded as well, unfortunately contributing to the poor score of my Titans DST. I actually got some mileage out of Brett Favre and Darren McFadden.

I got blown out in my NFL.com league. I just played the wrong guys. Plus Tom Brady stank agains the jets. But I’ve actually got some talent on this team.

My biggest worries are my QBs in the ESPN league, Anquan Boldin in a couple of leagues (he needs to get healthy and in the end zone), and running back Jamal Lewis is starting to look bad.

So far so good though.

I was probably one of the earliest fans of Paul Graham’s writings, even predicting the essay collection Hackers and Painters. Before that I actually bought copies of Ansi Common Lisp (2!) and On Lisp. All three copies (I never did buy Hackers and Painters) are proudly gathering dust in storage, along with my Lisp hacking skillz. I should point out that both titles are actually quite good and well written.

For some reason, I found his recent essay The List of N Things to be exceptionally amusing. Part of the charm is a bit of winking inconsistency that actually leads to solid consistency. Or vice-versa? Waitaminnit

Add in the fact that his popular Hacker News site occasionally seems to be overrun with listicles and there’s even more fun for the whole family.

Sometimes I am quite easily amused.

Somehow Cal made a two touchdown win against the Minnesota Golden Gophers feel like a narrow escape. The Bears burst out to a 14-0 lead, then let Minnesota hang around well into the fourth quarter. The special teams was sort of weak and the defense could never deliver the knockout blow. But a win is a win.

Did I mention the offense? More specifically Jahvid Best? He was pretty good. Five touchdowns good. No TD vultures this week. And back in the Heisman picture.

Meanwhile, in other news, the University of Spoiled Children spit the bit against the Washington Huskies, in a major road upset. This muddles both the national championship picture and the Pac-10 race as well. Odds on, USC won’t be able to play for the national title, which actually makes it harder for Cal to make the Rose Bowl.

Then again, if Cal takes care of business the next two weeks, this issue might be moot, and the Bears might be in the national championship chase.

So I made a comment about plastering together some Python modules to get “NodeBox plus a high end image processing substrate.” Turns out NodeBox already has Numpy baked in as of version 1.9.3. Should have done a little background research.

Looks like there’s some wheels I won’t have to reinvent. Would be nice if NodeBox had the Python Imaging Library included. This would make loading a wide variety of image formats into Numpy arrays quite easy. But incorporating that module into NodeBox will make a nice little personal project.

It’ll be good to build on a solid foundation with an active user community. The only limitation of NodeBox for me, relative to processing, is a handful of bitblt operations.

Okay so I’ve sort of made my peace with the wonkiness of MetaFilter’s RSS feed. Now I just blast through the feed really quickly in NetNewsWire, not even bothering with the item titles. I’d say I have about a 10% hit rate on MeFi posts that actually interest me.

One of the better recent ones was today’s post highlighting the work of Mark Skillz. Skillz seems to be a not quite professional historian of hip-hop. But he does have good connections and goes way back into time on his Hip Hop 101A site. Since the birth and rise of hip-hop was square in my formative years, I’ll have to dig into Skillz knowledge.

And the playlist on the MeFi post is to die for. I could immediately recall about 2/3 of those tracks on the instant of reading the title, plus other cuts where they were sampled. That’s right ya’ll I was (am) a bit of a disco freak.

Ha, ha. Only serious

P.S. Criminal though, leaving Let No Man Put Asunder out of that mix

P.P.S. Except it’s pretty hard for a 1983 release to exist in 1979ish. My bad

P.P.P.S. But Let No Man Put Asunder did appear on 1977’s Delusions album. However, the Shep Pettibone mix was the definitive one and it’s unclear to me when that version actually went into circulation. Salsoul just made an official public release in 1983 but it was probably kicking around on acetates and bootlegs long before. Like I said, disco freak. Here endeth the pedantry.

I haven’t been using Posterous as much as I would like, but I’m keeping an eye on what they’re up to. Today Posterous added theming, allowing users to more creatively style the look and feel of their Posterous sites.

I don’t know how well it actually works, but from reading the description Posterous was smart in the theming mechanisms it made available. First, you can just pick from a canned set of Posterous provided themes. Second, their engine is compatible with themes for Tumblr. This taps into a vibrant, pre-existing market or power users can write their own themes.

They’re quietly flying under the radar, but I get the sense that the Posterous team is putting together a good product.

Yes that David Byrne. The one from the Talking Heads. It’s not really a perfect city, but a list of qualities that would exist in his perfect city.

Obviously as a world class musician, he’s gotten to visit quite a few places in his time. I’m sure every other urban dweller who reads the article is measuring their city against the criterion, but I have to say I think Chicago (N.b. where I used to live) stacks up nicely:

• Size, second largest city in the US

• Density great urban core with a westward sprawl of tightly packed neighborhoods

• Sensibility and attitude good old big-shouldered Midwestern values, with a wry wink at all that “Second City” crap

• Security maybe the weakest point, waxes and wanes but overall not too bad

• Chaos and danger still plenty of room in Chicago for urban homesteading and Bohemian exploration amongst a few unruly parts of town, although Daley is probably trying to stamp them out even as we speak

• Human scale there’s quite a variety of interesting residential neighborhoods nestled within and around the skyscrapers of the Loop

• Parking not cheap by a long shot, but typically available and public transportation is quite serviceable including the classic El

• Boulevards Burnham’s radial avenues, Clark, Lincoln, et. al. should qualify

• Mixed use while the Loop empties around 6 PM, the rest of the city keeps on going until 4AM

• Public spaces, Helllloooo Lakefront, Grant Park, Midway, Belmont Harbor. I could go on ad nauseum.

One of the great things about Chicago is that from Memorial Day to Labor Day there are just tons of public festivals and gatherings at all scales. Bluesfest, Jazzfest, Gospelfest, Taste of Chicago, Air and Water Show, Dancing in the Park, Lallapalooza, Sox and Cubs, neighborhood festivals, block parties galore. Hundreds to hundreds of thousands of people get gather amiably, pleasantly milling about.

Not to mention Chicago has a great performing arts (music, theater, comedy, etc.) scene.

And we’ll keep quiet about the weather from October to May.

I know you still don’t care about my fantasy football team, but it’s still my blog. So I’ll write about my team if I want to. Actually, now it’s TEAMS, plural.

I’ll spare the front page though. The short story is I went 2 out of 3. And I’ve got a fourth team in a league I forgot about. The draft was today! More details on how my fledgling fantasy empire is faring after the break.

So the original Doom Patrol is my entry in an office league that’s been going for the three seasons I’ve been with my company. The scoring rules essentially haven’t changed over that period of time.

Feeling my fantasy oats, I was interested in checking out different sized leagues and different scoring regimes. Enter the public fantasy football leagues on Yahoo!, ESPN, and NFL.com.

I probably went a little overboard, adding three new teams to draft for and manage, but I learned a couple of things. There are a LOT of leagues out there, and that’s only the ones I could see. Not sure there’s a lot of owners, since folks can and do sign up for multiple leagues, but there’s a sizable market here. I like the ESPN draft interface and game tracker the best. The Yahoo! drag and drop roster management is pretty cool. I’m not sure NFL.com really has much to recommend it.

As to the results. The ur-Doom Patrol won handily and had the third highest score out of 14 teams. Having Drew Brees and Randy Moss will do that for you. Next up is a “critical” early season contest. I face the highest scoring team from this past week. The winner could have a pretty good leg up on securing a playoff spot. Plus they get to talk a lot of office smack.

Doom Patrol Beta, my Yahoo! public league team, rallied late to win comfortably. Similarly, this team had the league’s third highest score. My opponent had a bunch of Steelers who played Thursday and played well. Meanwhile, a number of my players played Sunday and Monday night.

Let’s not talk about Justice Society, my ESPN league team. For that team I wound up with the 6th out of 10 picks in the draft, arguably the worst draft spot of all. And it showed. I got smoked by 50 points. This team has a lot of second tier stars. Two of my best bets, Jay Cutler and Houston’s Andre Johnson, completely failed me. There’s hope for this team, but it’s going to be a struggle all season.

The New Mutants drafted 9th out of 12. Not great, but not horrible. I managed to pick Tom Brady, Marion Barber, and a bunch of #2 receivers. Plus a bunch of owners were on auto draft, which means I got another steal or two.

All in all, I’m glad I added a couple of extra leagues, although I may have overdone it a little bit. So far my draft acumen has probably demonstrated a marginal positive effect. The real fun begins when I try to pick up a few waiver wire steals to make up for some obvious holes on the various teams.

Found a new data driven, football site: Advanced NFL Stats

I’ve briefly examined the state of open football stats in the past and found them wanting. Now it looks like things are picking up with Pro-Football-Reference.Com. However, it looks like they’ve gone to buying their data from ESPN, which means no further distribution.

So much for open data.

Via: This Number Crunching Life

Looks like Apple is giving K’Naan some prominent play in their iPod Nano 5G and iTunes advertising. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they have the right song cued up.

I’ve said before I love my Nano 4G, but the new features of the iPod Nano 5G are tempting. The bigger screen and the FM receiver are the key attractors for me. The video recording and new colors I could do without. Wouldn’t a combination of iPod and XM/Sirius receiver be cool? It would beat the heck out of those crappy radios Sirius sells.

However, there are two other things higher on my technolust list. First, the Verizon MiFi is #1 on deck. I just find myself with too many short time windows where I could take advantage of my laptop and a little connectivity. And getting free of the need for a Starbucks or the library would be especially nice.

Second, I’d really like to checkout the iPhone App Store. Now I don’t actually want an iPhone, but I can get the App Store experience using an iPod Touch. I was pretty much set even before the most recent Touch announcements. The price point I was targeting now gets you 32 GB, plus the new features. At that storage level, I can get almost all of my iTunes library onto the iPod.

So as much as I like the new Nano, it’ll have to wait. Frankly, it would be gluttony, so I don’t think one is in my near future.

Cal unloaded on another weak team this weekend, letting Eastern Washington hang around for a quarter then blowing their doors off. What’s with the TD vulture Vereen messing up Jahvid Best’s Heisman highlight reel? Next week the Bears are on the road at Minnesota which will definitely be a step up from Maryland and Eastern Washington. At home the Terps barely escaped James Madison University, an FCS (nee 1AA) school.

Have to say the Michigan - Notre Dame tilt was pretty good, especially given who the loser was. Time to dig into some Golden Domer angst on the Web, although I’m sure they’re convinced that they’re just one step away.

And is it me, or does the Big 12 look really suspect this season?

Today, September 11th, was rather somber and gray here in Washington, DC. The day started off quite rainy and never completely cleared up.

In the past, I’ve watched United 93 or MSNBC’s replay of the day’s events in 2001. I could find neither for my evening viewing. Instead, I got Bud Fox, Gordon Gekko, and the World Trade Center in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, its themes and sermons still quite appropriate 22 years later.

So why did I put so much effort into getting Pygame, Numpy, and Pycairo into the same Python interpreter? I’m interested in creating demoscene like visualizations. luis2048’s processing final project is an example of the type of generative art I want to experiment with.

Clearly this could be done with processing but I feel like that tool’s image processing capabilities are limited. By that I mean there isn’t much domain specific language or library in processing related to bit level image manipulation. I’m curious as to what might go into a good language for writing these visualizations. Numpy should provide a solid foundation for image processing abstracting much of the array processing hair.

Also, I’d rather use Python than Java. I think Python has some built-in data structures and modules that might be particularly useful.

So that’s what I’m puttering and nattering on about.

Google Desktop on Snow Leopard is dead according to this discussion thread. I didn’t use GDesktop a lot, but I have (had) a handy LaunchBar plug-in that made it easy to use. Google Quick Search Box is intended as the replacement. As of this writing, QSB’s interface is confusing the heck out of me. Apparently QSB is not much more than an application launcher wrappred around Spotlight and souped up with access to information in your Google account(s).

I’ll give QSB a cursory trial but I’ll probably wind up sticking with LaunchBar and Spotlight.

Apropos of nothing, I’d also like to take this opportunity to curse the MacPorts migration process for mucking up my ImageMagick installation. I use ImageMagick to process the images for this site from the command line. The tools were well integrated into my workflow. Yet another strike against MacPorts.

Hoping to be completely unbusted on Snow Leopard by the end of the week.