Speaker for the Diodes

5:26AM - QotD

-- on the PBS television program, Charlie Rose, 2009-10-20

6:37PM - Virtualizing Traffic, Old MacDonald Explained, and Other Randomness

I managed, after multiple tries, to get all the way to Herndon (previous attempts stymied by not feeling well enough to drive that far, and by traffic problems bad enough to make the trip not feasible at the hour I was on the road), and now the Mac boots again. *whew*.

Amazed at traffic that really, really looked like rush hour on I-95, the Capitol Beltway, I-66, and US-50, on a Saturday night and a Sunday afternoon. Near as I could figure, somebody must have extended the concept of virtual memory to virtual roadway capacity, and all those other cars were either from Friday or today, having overflowed their actual rush-hours and been swapped out to weekend-bandwidth.^[1][2] I'm not sure how the time-travel aspect of this is implemented, or whether other cities are doing this too; just that as a mostly off-peak driver I found being unexpectedly in rush-hour a bit startling.

Today, between muscle pain and headache, I'm not doing so well. But I've got the Mac back, and my Internet connection seems to have recovered from its flakiness last week, and I can hunker down in my bed and try not to move very much.

An LJ entry and subsequent comments that have a rewritten song lyric stuck in my brain:

Until porysski's comment, I was safe. But now it's stuck in my head too.

[ By way of metaquotes, which in turn I was reading thanks to silmaril]

I think there was some interesting stuff on this morning's (or last night's^[3]) Charlie Rose, but alas by the time I got around to trying to watch it, local rush hour had started, and I couldn't really hear the television. I'll try again later, after both my headache and traffic noise recede a bit.

And just so I remember it later, a phrase that came out of a telephone conversation with realinterrobang regarding so-called ergonomic features that aren't adjustable to fit different users: Procrustean ergonomics.

[1] If flextime were more broadly applied, it could be considered a less fanciful application of the virtualization of roadway carrying capacity: one of the trumpeted benefits of flextime when it was being talked about more, was that if enough people shifted their work schedules around, traffic load could be smoothed out and the horrendous peaks of rush hour would be smaller. (And yes, I'm aware of the mix of good and bad reasons flextime doesn't wind up being such a silver bullet.)

[2] While crawling along I-495 at about 20 MPH (about 30 KPH), I had some time to start wondering about the bandwidth of the Beltway. If you measure the capacity in people, then the bandwidth depends on, among other things, the packet size: if you fill the road with single-occupant SUVs you get a lower bandwidth than if each vehicle on the road is a standing-room-only cowded bus. Of course, speed matters as well, in that we can fit more pedestrians onto the road than people in vehicles, at the cost of delivering each person to hir destination much more slowly. When I got to the point of imagining all those pedestrians naked, to squeeze out all the space otherwise taken up by clothing and thus wedge several more people in, and concluded that that might cause an additional complication as additional people got made en route as a side effect, I finally decided I'd reached a point of silliness⁴.

[3] My local PBS station shows it at 09:00 and 12:30, so I think of it as a morning show, but I think the dates on the episodes in the archives and in the schedule of upcoming shows are for the night before the morning when I see it.

[4] Okay, it'd need to be a much longer road than that for gestation to take less time than the travel time, and feeding and watering all those people in transit would have to be worked out. And we'd need a model for estimating the odds that two fertile individuals attracted enough to each other (or bored enough) would wind up pressed against each other, to figure out the magnitude of this effect.

5:26AM - QotD

"And so we have a poisonous media environment in which the 'conservative media' consist of lying conspiracy theorists who are out to destroy President Obama and any other liberal they come across, and the 'mainstream press' is considered 'liberal' even as it 'leans over so far backward to avoid the charge of left bias that it ends up either neutered or leaning to the right.'

That's some range, isn't it? From right-wing liars who purposefully traffic in conservative misinformation all the way across the spectrum to frightened liberals who accidentally traffic in conservative misinformation."

-- Jamison Foser, "The media's Glenn Beck problem", 2009-10-16

5:26AM - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-02-24:

"I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." -- David Foster Wallace, from his article E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993.

(submitted to the mailing list by Reg Harbeck)

2:21PM - Using OpenID To Answer Polls

Huh. DW says non-DW users can respond to polls using OpenID. Only one person has responded (using the poll buttons) to my poll from yesterday, and one complained about not being able to do so. This tells me that (a) there's a hiccup in the process of filling out DW polls using OpenID, (b) how to do so is confusing, (c) both, or (d) it works right but filling out poll answers isn't important enough to be worth clicking through the extra steps for, for many people.

I think (d) seems likely -- it's more steps than using OpenID to leave a comment, and it's really not a very compelling or entertaining poll -- (and feel free to simply respond in a comment, of course), but just in case it's (a) or (b), I went and found out what the steps are. It's a little more annoying than I'd expected, but it did work for me. (Note that there are a few people for whom OpenID just doesn't seem to work in general, for reasons that so far remain mysterious. And debugging somebody else's problem on a site I don't admin, when I can't replicate the problem myself, is not going to get very far, alas.)

I logged out of DW, and tried to fill in the poll. It looked like I simply could not do so. Then I went to the main page, http://www.dreamwidth.org/, which (if you're not currently logged in) has a login button with username/password text entry fields next to it up in the upper-right corner. There's small text up there, "Log in with OpenID", which links to http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid. (The "Log in with OpenID" link next to the login button on http://www.dreamwidth.org/login also takes you there.)

(In what follows, assume we're currently logged in on LJ ...)

I told LJ months ago to automatically accept OpenID credential requests from DW, so I just typed "dglennlivejournal.com" into the box on http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid, and was immdiately logged into DW as my LJ identity, and could fill in the poll. If you've used OpenID to leave a comment on DW recently, and checked the leave-me-logged-in tickybox, you should already be able to fill in the poll.

If I hadn't told LJ to grant future DW OpenID requests, then I would've gotten a page from LJ telling me that DW was asking LJ to confirm that this user claiming to be me-at-LJ is really me. Telling LJ "yes, I triggered that request, it's really me," allows LJ to tell DW, "yeah, it's her," and at that point I'm logged into DW not as me-the-DW-user, but as me-the-LJ/OpenID-user, and can fill in the poll (or leave comments under my LJ identity, or customize DW viewing options under that OpenID login, even attach a user icon IIRC, etc.) I went into more detail on this process in the context of leaving comments, a few months ago and a few months before that.

This process is rather less of an obstacle when leaving comments (except for the folks for whom OpenID just doesn't seem to work, which I wish I was in a position to figure out), and I expect most folks are a bit more motivated when they've already decided to leave a comment and just need to choose between OpenID and anonymous, than when they're still deciding whether it's worth the trouble to fill in a poll. Having "use OpenID" as a visible option on the comment form makes it a lot easier than having to remember, "Oh yeah, I can go to the login page (or directly to the OpenID login page) and log in first, if I want to fill this out" ...

... but if any of you are inspired to experiment a bit with OpenID this afternoon, then hey, I get more poll answers as a side effect. And in the future, if somebody posts a poll where you really, really want to make your voice heard, now you'll know how.

5:26AM - QotD

"My wardrobe is threefold: Things I wear during sex, Things I wear to have more sex and most importantly, 'I don't give a shit.'" -- Twitter user VaginaDrum, 2009-10-26

4:26PM - What's Up With Me, and User Interface Opinion Questions

Uh, did somebody just buy me a gift subscription to Science News? A copy of the current issue just arrived in today's mail ... and I did recently mentioned (and a little less recently) mention having been a reader of it in the past.

If so, thank you. A lot. I've missed it. It's a bit thicker now than I remember.

I could probably get all the same news from the web nowadays, but someties it's just easier -- feels more relaxed and recreational -- to read stuff like that on paper. And by just turning pages instead of scrolling up and down and then deciding which links to click next. (I love the web, but I'm glad we still have dead-trees publications as well.)

[Note: primary copy of this poll is at Dreamwidth -- that's where the copies of this entry on sites where I can't post polls will link to.]

For folks who use command-line tools: if a command has both a "display version number" option and a "more verbose output" option, which of these is more intuitive (and/or less likely to be annoying)?

If some combinations of command-line arguments might produce not-completely-obvious results, but those combinations are potentially useful so they should merely be warned about rather than disallowed, which of these seems more useful?

Let's say you have a bunch of files in a directory (say, "arbeau.abc", "machaut.abc", and "frtrad.abc" in a directory named "french") and some or all are hard-links to (not copies of) entries in another directory (perhaps "french/arbeau.abc" also appears as "dance/arbeau.abc" and "french/machaut.abc" is the same file as "songs/machaut.abc") ... and you decide to modify all the files in that directory ("french") in a batch, using a tool that replaces files with edited versions and optionally saves backups (named *.bak or *~). Which of these sounds like the most correct behaviour (most likely to be desired, least likely to induce cursing)?

[*] Not really, but it's related. A symbolic link is like an alias. A hard link is where a single file on disk has two names -- an occasionally useful error in an MS-DOS filesystem, an established, intentional feature in Unix -- and neither filename is any more or less "real" than the other. I don't know whether recent versions of Windows have added this feature or not, but in older versions you could force it to happen, at the risk of CHKDSK "repairing" it later.

I'm not sure whether I'll get back to the project that sparked the questions in that poll (see below), but the responses will pertain to some future project too, I'm sure.

Despite the welcome arrival of a copy of Science News, it's been a discouraging week. The Mac won't boot, and it died just as I was fine-tuning the interface for a program that was nearly ready to share, beautifully comment, with a man-page and everything ... that I had not yet copied elsewhere to try compiling on a different OS, or to post yet. There was a lot else not backed up, but most of that will merely annoy and inconvenience me; this bit is the "somebody kicked over my masterpiece sand castle just before I finished it" kick in the gut. (Hmm. Much of what was backed up was backed up to DVD. I'm not sure yet whether any of my other computers can handle that. Experiments to put on my to-do list.)

Couple that with the main Linux workstation -- the bedroom machine -- which I hadn't been using much since I was given the Mac, no longer talking to its monitor, and I've been getting by with an itty-bitty Windows XP machine with a tiny screen and a so-so X server on it for the past few days, and it's been really putting a dent in my enthusiasm. So, in the immortal word of Charlie Brown: AAAUUUUUUGH!

(The bedroom Linux machine shows the POST messages on the monitor -- which is itself having major problems, but I have an even larger monitor to use ifwhen I ever feel capable of getting it up the stairs -- but at some point the screen goes blank and nothing I do to the keyboard or mouse will light it up again. I can SSH to it, and throw X apps to the itty bitty XP screen (a VAIO that only works when plugged into the wall), but I don't get the benefit of the decent-sized screen or the larger keyboard.)

The small screen is fine for web surfing and email; not so good for editing source in one window, editing docs in another, looking stuff up in a third, and viewing output in a fourth, or comparing two PS/PDF pages side by side. Or maybe I'm just spoiled from having a Mac to use for the past several months.

I haven't had the heart to start reconstructing a week of coding from scratch (get a filter working: a couple hours; add enough comments that I won't be embarrassed if anybody else sees it, usefully robust command-line arguments and options, and somewhat reasonable user documentation: a week) -- and I'm still clinging to the faint hope that the files can be recovered -- so I tried to dive back into composing and arranging, and am finding the tiny screen even more annoying for that than for programming. Or maybe I'm just too acutely frustrated and discouraged to cope with even small inconveniences right now. Maybe I'll feel differently about this in a month. But right now, it sucks.

The plan is to head down to Virginia to see whether justgus37, who has more Mac tools, more Mac experience, and OS install media, has any more success ressurecting the Mac than I've had. Wednesday I wasn't feeling well enough to drive that far; last night I got a late start and then ran into some kind of mess that turned I95 and the Beltway into obstacles instead of arteries, and turned back after it became clear I wouldn't get there at any sane hour. So: trying again tonight, if I'm up to it, which at the moment is iffy but I've still got little under and hour to decide. (By the time I got home again last night, it hurt to steer, and I've got power steering. But on the plus side, I got more sleep this morning than the past couple of days, so let's see what my body decides to do with that.)

I want my code back. I want my files back. I want my tools back. This business of knowing I need more backup media and a big disk for a live backup, but not being able to afford either ... well it's starting to wear me down.

5:26AM - QotD

-- from the PBS television program, Bill Moyers Journal, 2009-10-16

12:42PM - QotD

"I do not like this word 'bomb'. It is not a bomb; it is a device which is exploding." -- French ambassador Jacques Le Blanc (sometime in 1995?)

[My ISP where the QotD script runs was installing a new file server last night/this morning ... I'm guessing that has something to do with the script not being executed this morning, since its scheduled run was in the middle of the maintenance window.]

12:35PM - Dream Fragment

( a short conversation )

5:26AM - QotD

"I'm waiting for a simple straightforward 'The Only Solution To The Swine Flu Crisis Is To Give Me A Big Pile Of Money' article. I honestly don't know whether to expect it to appear in The Onion or a 'normal' news outlet." -- stevemb, 2009-10-30

5:26AM - QotD

"justice is not about the law. though the law should be about justice." -- stoneself, 2009-10-16

5:26AM - QotD

-- from the PBS television program, Bill Moyers Journal, 2009-10-16

5:26AM - QotD

"Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?" -- John Dos Passos, 1917

[I don't suppose calendars with intercalary months count, but does getting an extra hour at the start of Samhain due to the end of Daylight Spending Time count as a (very short) gap? Happy New Year, folks, and don't forget to check your clocks (and VCRs and PDAs and ...) if you live in a place that ends DST on the US schedule.]

12:41PM - I may be overcommenting

Is this over-commenting / a sign that I didn't sleep well enough last night? I just wrote, in a C program:

    int     i;                     /* Ye olde generick loope counter (you  */
                                   /* do know that the 'Y' in "ye olde" is */  
                                   /* really supposed to be a _thorn_, so  */
                                   /* it's still pronounced "the old" not  */
                                   /* "yee old" right?  Well you do now.   */
                                   /* Not sure what most C compilers would */
                                   /* do with a non-ASCII character in a   */
                                   /* comment though.  But I digress ...)  */

I do seem to comment more extensively after trying to read almost anybody else's code, where I'm lucky to find comments describing a function's purpose, much less any explanation of its arguments or useful clues as to where I need to poke at it to add a feature. And I've been reading other people's code lately.

Obviously, this is code I'm planning to send to a bunch of other people ... (But while I'm posting -- do other compilers supply the __FILE__ and __DATE__ pre-defined macros, or is that just a gcc thing? I don't know what Windows users will compile this with.)

5:26AM - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-11-01:

"Ye had need tak care how ye dispute the existence of fairies, brownies and apparitions there; ye may as weel dispute the Gospel o' Sant Matthew." -- James Hogg, in 'The Wool Gatherer'.

http://www.archive.org/stream/talesandsketches01hoggrich]

(submitted to the mailing list by Jean Rogers)

[The line is spoken by a character named Barnaby.]

Happy Hallow'een and a blessed Samhain Eve, all!

5:26AM - QotD

"We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future." -- Randall Munroe, xkcd, 2009-10-21 (image title attribute on that day's strip -- hover over the image (or use "view source") to see it), comparing Terminator to today

5:26AM - QotD

From the PBS television program, Charlie Rose (formerly The Charlie Rose Show according to IMDB), 2009-05-11 (video and transcript):

5:26AM - QotD

"One way to introduce a course like this would be to promise you that by reading these books and by debating these issues you will become a better more responsible citizen. You will examine the presuppositions of public policy, you will hone your political judgment, you will become a more effective participant in public affairs. This would be a partial and misleading promise.

"Political philosophy for the most part hasn't worked that way. You have to allow for the possibility that political philosophy may make you a worse citizen rather than a better one. Or at least a worse citizen before it makes you a better one. And that's because philosophy is a distancing (even debilitating) activity.

"And you see this going back to Socrates [...]

"[...] philosophy distances us from conventions, from established assumptions, and from settled beliefs. And those are the risks, personal and political.

[...]

"... the very fact [these questions] have recurred and persisted may suggest that though they are impossible in one sense, they're unavoidable in another. And the reason they're unavoidable, the reason they're inescapable, is that we live some answer to these questions every day... just throwing up your hands and giving up on moral reflection is no solution."

-- professor Michael Sandel [copied from longer passage quoted at The Obligate Scientist; also in a clip shown on the PBS television program Charlie Rose, 2009-10-12]

5:26AM - QotD

From Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler ( howardtayler), 2009-09-13: