Will's blog

Between the end of 2003 and mid-2007, I played in a D&D campaign that was really fantastic. The campaign ran its course and our stalwart crew of awesomeness saved the world and then we went our separate ways.

During that period of time, I kept copious notes in a MoinMoin wiki of our adventures. It was always a hope that I'd take these notes and do something with them.

I played in another campaign in 2007 and used InkScape to do a comic of the first session or two of that campaign in the style of Order of the Stick. It was a lot of fun, but took forever to do each panel. I decided it'd take me a long time to do 4 years worth of sessions in comic form.

So I started a book version. I wrote a Python script (which I've since lost) that converted MoinMoin format into restructured text. Then I threw the whole thing together with Sphinx. This allowed me to edit in restructured text, compile a LaTeX document, and then generate a PDF from that. Plus I got to spend some quality time with Sphinx to see how well it generates manuals.

That worked really well except for some minor issues.

First, I needed to set the paper size in the resulting PDF. To do that, I set the latex_preamble in the conf.py file to:

latex_preamble = '\\usepackage[papersize={6in,9in}]{geometry}\n' \
                 '\\setcounter{tocdepth}{1}'

That creates the PDF in the size I needed: 6in x 9in.

Second, I needed to fix some images so they were in a table with text. I ended up writing the LaTeX for that by hand.

Third, I didn't think the chapter headings really fit with what I wanted to build, so I changed the fncychap style to Lenny.

While I was editing the LaTeX directly, I ended up changing some of the front matter and removed the index (didn't need an index to a novel).

It took me a year to put the book together. It's around 240 pages or so. Today I finished it up, created a Lulu project for the book and had a bunch of copies printed for the others in the group. Feels good to have that done. I'm looking forward to getting a copy in the mail.

I'm heading to Portland, OR for OSCON 2008 to help man the Mozilla booth at the Expo. I registered as an Expo attendee, but I'll be there (or near there) from the 19th through the 26th.

My primary purpose there is as a representative for Miro and talking to people about it. However, I'm also interested in meeting up with people working on:

• PyBlosxom things
• Miro and video podcasting things
• Python 2.6/3.0 testing, documentation, bug-fixing, ... things

If you're interested, too, ping me. I'm hanging out on the #oscon channel on irc.freenode.net and you can always get me by email or comments below.

I volunteered at ROFLCon yesterday and today. The whole experience was really surreal but fantastic! I thoroughly enjoyed the sessions I attended while "on duty" and the new friends I made. I also came home with a sticker that says "Bacon is a vegetable". That sums that up.

Work has been pretty busy. I've been doing release manager stuff, working on Gutsy packaging issues, puzzling over an intermittent problem between the sun-java6-plugin and Miro, working on a Firefox extension, and working on a patch for Firefox 3.0.

I went to some of the after-hours activities for the GNOME Summit Boston. I'm going to PodCamp Boston this weekend.

I was writing my todo list management application in Django, but then decided to switch it to Pylons. Now I'm thinking I may just go a much easier route and implement it in web.py. A year ago, I wrote a wiki system that was code-friendly using web.py in three hours which included the amount of time it took to learn how web.py worked.

PyBlosxom work for version 2.0 has slowed considerably. I just haven't had much time to spend on it. A bunch of us are hanging out in #pyblosxom on irc.freenode.net and we're talking about things more often. I met paulproteus in real life during the GNOME Summit Boston. I'm trying to figure out how to create multi-page output using docutils. There was some development in that arena over the summer, some of it due to a GSoC project. I need to spend some more time to figure out what's available now in SVN, how to use it, and whether it'll fix my problem.

I've upgraded all my machines to Gutsy. It's nice--the fonts seem to be much easier to read on both my laptop and my desktop with an LCD.

That about covers it. It's been a low-Python high-JavaScript month.

S and I decided to assign tables for our guests during the wedding reception. There were a bunch of good reasons for doing this which I'm not going to go into here. However, assigning 100 or so guests to 10 or so tables while maximizing "goodness" and minimizing "badness" isn't trivial to do on paper by hand. At some point during wedding planning, I decided we could do table layout with a modified register allocation algorithm. This is a quick summary of translating register allocation into table layout along with some commentary on how this works nicely and also where it doesn't quite work.

More after the jump....

Read more...

The 48 Hour Film Project for Boston 2007 has come to an end and it was pretty awesome. There were 100 teams this year of which 92 finished films and handed them in. I helped usher again and saw some 83 movies over the course of the last two weeks. A bunch of them were filmed within a half mile of my apartment just outside of Davis Square.

This is my fourth year ushering. Over the four years the movies have gotten better. A large portion of the teams have done it for several years and you can definitely tell they've gotten most of the kinks out of their filming and post-production. I think the availability of better filming and production equipment and software helps as well. Some of the teams were mentioning how they used cameras that stored data on hard drives directly and this saved them gobs of time that they would have spent transferring the data from tape to hard drive.

The 48hfp folks have created a new site for hosting movies at http://www.48.tv, though they don't have the Boston 2007 movies up yet (obviously). Some teams are uploading their movies onto YouTube and other video sites. If you search for "48hfp" or "48 hour film Boston 2007" you can see them.

It was a really great year for movies. There's a Best Of showing at the Cooliedge Corner Theatre on June 7th. It's definitely worth going to if you've got the time. There are more details here under "Best Of".

I think most people have stories about their undergrad days in Computer Science where they were hooked up to an intervenous drip of caffeine and staying up all hours of the night wrangling with assembler on a robot that had lasers for eyes and could do backflips down the hall and land on both feet while juggling C pointers and doing remote garbage collection ... And most of the stories from these days are eseentially myths and the characters of those stories are the CS equivalent of Greek gods.

One of those people from my undergrad days was Window Snyder. She was just the awesome of the awesome. She had a VAX machine for a coffee table. As I recall, she dropped out because she was involved in some clandestine project somewhere that involved all kinds of stuff that so boggled my mind at the time that I don't even remember a hint of it.

Gary (another Greek god from my undergrad days) told me that she's now the head of security strategy at Mozilla. Sure enough, she even has her own wiki page. Craziness!

If this "ban things that could potentially be something nasty on board an airplane" thing goes on long enough, Playboy is going to have to buy all the airlines because we're all going to have to fly nude. I'm seriously looking forward to that day. When it happens, I'm going to fly around the world. I don't much like flying and I don't much like travelling, but nude--hell yeah! w00t!

I saw on boingboing a link to XKCD and I started skimming it at work (naughty naughty Will!) mostly because I'm feeling uninspired to go through the specification one more time and make sure I dotted all the is and crossed all the ts that are vaguely hinted at and would be obvious to someone who had looked at this code before but I'm not in that situation so I'm doing a lot of double and triple-checking.

Long story short: XKCD: Valentine - Karnaugh is very very funny. The subject matter isn't funny; the words aren't funny; the use of a Karnaugh map is fantastically funny.

The City of Somerville is showing The Muppet Movie at the Seven Hills Park which is next to the T-stop in Davis Square (in Massachusetts in the US on planet earth for you extra-terrestials seeking a fresh supply of brains to eat and mulling over conquering our silly little planet).

S and I (and a few other people we dragged along) saw some of the movies last year. We saw Goonies last year and it's a funky experience seeing Goonies on a big screen outside after dark with dark sinister clouds drifting overhead threatening sinister rain. Big screen, big sound, little kids running around pointing out anything that's point-out-able.

Two weekends ago (June 23rd, 24th and 25th), S and I and S's parents went up to Schenectady, NY to the Old Songs Festival. It was fantastic! Contra dancing, Shetland fiddling, flat-picking, blues, bluegrass, Celtic harp, ... I had a great time and the experience was educational, inspirational, and in various ways eye-opening.

Last year at Old Songs, S's parents won a guitar. I've been playing it on and off for a year or so now and it's got a great sound to it. It's very different from my Guild American--I think the best way to describe it is that it's less muddy and it's brighter. Though part of that could be due to a need to change the strings on my Guild American.

I attended a few workshops of Beppe Gambetta, a flatpicker from Genoa, Italy. He taught one workshop on stretching and gymnastics for better flatpicking, most of it focusing on making the left hand more agile. Great stuff.

Jay Mankita had a song called "They Lied" which I've been humming since I heard it--it's catchy.

Great experience. I'm looking forward to next year, though S said that the festival coincides with GA, so I think we'll wait a couple years before going again.

On a side note, I brought my Nokia 770 with several ebooks and Mahjong on it. It was super useful.

I just finished the midterm for my Principles of Programming Languages class with Professor Mitch Wand and it was an absolutely exciting experience. So exciting that when I got home I wrote an email to Professor Wand telling him that it was the most exciting exam I've had at Northeastern. It was filled with all these exciting mind-bending puzzles complete with subtle nuances and all kinds of exciting stuff!

So then I told S that I just wrote my professor to tell him that the exam was really awesome. Then it occurred to me that I'm a nerd--the evidence is clear on that note. Then I said, "Gosh--I should just follow it up with an entry on my blog!" At that point, S burst out laughing and said, "You know you're a nerd when you come home from a midterm, write to the professor telling him it was really great, and then write a blog entry about the whole thing complete with introspection of the entire event." Well, she didn't say that whole thing, but she was definitely thinking it.

I have an interesting idea for a card game. I want to make all the cards and print them out myself, but I'm not sure what to use for card-stock and/or how to go about doing it. Anyone know of pointers on the Internet that talk about publishing a card game? Think something like Uno in the sense that there are cards, but otherwise entirely unlike Uno.

I finally beat it. I've sort of been working on it for a few years now and I'd get stuck at various points. I never got stuck puzzle-wise. I always got stuck trying to kill one guy without having my party eviscerated.

Anyhow, I'm glad it's done and off my hard drive. Beyond that the story was interesting, but the UI was kind of irritating (especially on my laptop). I have Baldur's Gate II, but I think I'm going to wait to play that for a month or so.

I went to the Sipser colloqium today and he discussed P versus NP. I've taken two Algorithms classes and a Theory of Computation class, too, but I still found it really interesting especially given that Sipser wrote the Theory of Computation book we used.

So he does this whole presentation thing and it's really interesting and such and then he takes some questions. The last question was from a woman who had just taken a Theory of Computation course (using his book) and wanted to know why it should be required. I always find questions like that curious. In this case, I'm glad I know about the things I learned in that course. While they're more mathematical in nature than what I'm typically used to, I think they provide an awesome grounding in what kinds of problems are doable and what kinds of problems are computationally difficult. While I'm not planning to continue investigating whether P = NP or P != NP, it's really interesting to know that they exist, what they are, and why they're really interesting.

Anyhow, long story short, it was a really interesting colloqium, I'm glad I'm in grad school, and people who need validation for the things they're learning beyond the knowledge itself puzzle me.

It turns out my internet connection was sucking for a week because evil ninja squirrels ate the cable that goes from the telephone pole to the building my apartment is in and then the cable filled with water. Who knew evil ninja squirrels were such a threat to my bottom line?!

The technician was awesome and replaced the line using an 18' ladder precariously parked in the middle of the semi-busy street in 20 minutes. The frosting on the cake was when he came inside and said, "Yeah, so squirrels chewed on the line and then it filled with water. There's nothing we can do about that because we can't kill all the squirrels."

It's a shame that my laptop doesn't become stronger and healthier if I give it a good workout on a regular basis. If this weren't true, then I could run it through some regular weight-training and it'd work better for me. Of course, if that were true of everyone's laptops, then you could walk into a cafe and glance around at all the laptops and know which people use their laptop primarily for word processing and email and which people are doing fluid dynamics simulations, compiling, Folding@Home and things like that.

S and I finally got around to going to Sound Bites--a restaurant in Ball Square about a half mile from Davis Square in Somerville, MA. It's really kind of silly--I've been living in the area since 2002 and I knew the place was there and I knew about all the fancy things people said about it. I even knew a bunch of people who've been there and can't think of anything else to say other than, "dude--the food is amazing."

So this morning, S and I decided to start our day with brunch at Sound Bites after having mildly terrible Thursdays and it was wonderful wonderful wonderful. If you're in the area, skip Rosebud (which I think is particularly overrated) and walk the half-mile to Sound Bites. It's worth it.

Boston Phoenix review

S and I went to see the Robert Turner exhibit at Harvard Museum of Natural History and it's simply glorious. Definitely worth seeing if you're in the area--the images are vivid and breath-taking. It'll be there until March 26, 2006.

I'm back from Florida and mildly sunburned. It was really sunny, hot and humid and it's nice to be back in Somerville where it's cold and overcast. It'll give me a chance to recover; vacation from vacation.

I'm heading off to Florida for a week for some vacation. When I get back, I start the long process of re-learning all the things I knew in college and figuring out the other things I need to do before grad school.

Somewhere in there, I'll finish up some of the things I started in PyBlosxom-land like the manual and fixing issues with the web-site.

Anyhow, if you're looking for me, I won't be around until July 6th.

My co-worker was telling me about TA games he plays with his family and mentioned all these units I'd never heard of. I have TA and TA: Core Contingency, but that's it.

Anyone still play Total Annihilation? Are there other unit packs or other things that are interesting and worth looking into?

I figured I'd join the diet fad and present my 100%-satisfaction-guaranteed best-results-ever fad diet. I hope to make a million dollars selling copious amounts of totally non-relevant diet materials and possibly confusing people in regards to the basics of nutrition using highly ambiguous terms and gross misrepresentations of how things work. I will then give those million dollars over to various charities and studies seeking to help people fix their confidence, self-image, and alleviate the ill-effects psychological or otherwise of obesity.

This diet is a little different since it's not really a diet but rather a DIEt. See, it's the d20 DIEt. It's better than sliced bread. You'll lose the weight you should be losing rather than the weight you think you want to lose.

This weblog entry summarizes the diet rather than goes into long-form. I'm saving that for my soon-to-be-best-selling book about the DIEt.

Read more...

My brother is the producer this year for the Boston 48 hour film project again. So I showed up to help out on the kick-off on Friday night and again for the drop-off on Sunday night. All very exciting.

Last year there were some 48 teams. This year there were 62 or 63 so the place was packed. As I was helping out, I recognized a lot of people who did it last year--that's pretty cool. I even remembered some names here and there.

There are going to be 5 screenings this year. We learned a lot about ushering last year and I hope to employ ISO 9001 compliant policies, standards, and things of that nature to this year's ushering. It's going to be a busy couple of weeks!

http://www.48hourfilm.com/boston-2005.htm

[You said to Capn]: linux rulez!
[You said to Capn]: apples are c00l!
[You said to Capn]: winblowz sux0rz!
[Capn said]: Oh
[Capn said]: /me compiles with the -O3 flag
[Capn said]: I'm gonna show her my -O3 face!
[You said to Capn]: ha!

I'm in the Boston area and it's snowing pretty hard out. They're saying all kinds of things like we should all just go back to bed for a few days and sleep through it.

I'm proposing a less defeatist idea. I vote we should all switch to the New England diet! Snow for breakfast, lunch and dinner! If we all band together we can pull through this, lose a few pounds, and clear our streets! Because freedom shouldn't be allowed to get snowed in!

But the New England Diet isn't going to stop there, no sir! I'm going to write a book and start a company to produce New England Diet meals and we'll ship them around the world and I'll make a million dollars.

ARrr!!

It really is one of the best days of celebration every year.

I'm on the openzaurus-users list and this guy Eddie sends these emails where his friendly name is:

   eD\\/ARd0 F/\\KEn^M3

I'd post examples, but SF.net has a terrible archive system.

It puzzles me as to why anyone would ever want a friendly name like that. When has l337-speak actually been elite?

Using a sheet of stamps as a bookmark is a terrible idea for multiple reasons:

1. You "run out of stamps" and have to get more--but are puzzled as to where you used them all.
2. You put the book down for a year or so and when you pick it up again the price of stamps has gone up 4 cents which makes using those stamps a hassle (though my fix for this is to just keep waiting and eventually the stamp is the right amount for postcards).
3. If you used the "licky" stamps, sometimes there's just enough moisture over the period of time it's been in the book that the stamps become parmanently adhered to the page that you bookmarked.

So don't do it! Terrible idea!

The new folks at Gizmodo are great. I love their cynical eye-rolling take on almost everything. My roommate commented similarly a few days ago. Anyhow, this write-up is superb. Not only because it's pretty funny, but also because I have no idea who I'd rather be trapped on a desert island with. I don't think I could stand any of the listed potential island-mates for more than 30 seconds. Fortunately, I suspect that if I kept to myself, all three would die off pretty quickly as I don't think they have a clue about anything much less how to survive on a desert island.

Still, you have to give those three props. It's rare that you can get paid a decent salary even if you haven't a clue what you're talking about.

Gizmodo rocks!

I want to be Mike when I grow up. He knows all kinds of things about all kinds of things. His mind is like the Library of Congress. I'd love to know what kind of superhuman cataloguing system he uses to remember everything with.

I think the only topic that is really outside the scope of his massive knowledge base (and it's only a matter of time before this isn't true) is RedHat Linux administration. While I don't know much more than he does, I have a deeply nuanced auto-response for most of his questions which goes something like this, "They probably have a gui tool for that. Look somewhere in that menu thing."

The previous posts were mostly about ushering and how much sleep I got. I'd like to dedicate this post to Ed who didn't get any gametime in any of my earlier posts. Ed's film was fantastic. It was at once eloquent and moving. It was the only movie with aliens flying around in their ships zapping people with their alien rays. It was the only movie with a brain in a jar.

Ed was a thug and then a pirate. I think he should quit his current job as a Web Developer and join the theatre. The world has enough Web Developers but it yearns for men of Ed's talent.

I'm really glad this is the last group. I've ushered for every single show thus far and my ass is really sore. When they sell out, I end up either standing in the back or sitting on the floor--neither of which are comfortable.

The hours are really long, too. Even though the Somerville Theatre is right around the corner from my apartment, I'm getting to bed at 1:00am after working at work for 9 hours and then at this thing for another 6.

There were some good movies in this batch. Now that I've seen all the movies from all the groups, I'd have to say the first group was the best overall, though there were movies in other groups that I liked.

The ImprovAsylum folks really like musicals. They're really good at them, too. It's tempting to go see one of their shows.

We did the third showing at the Somerville Theatre. I have to say, I liked being at the Brattle Theatre a lot more than I did at the Somerville Theatre.

I would have thought it'd be the other way around since the Brattle only has one screen and they're so artsy that you'd think they'd get into this "we're artsy and above all that non-art riff-raff" but they don't. The people were way cool and helpful and the place itself was easy to do our thing in.

The Somerville Theatre people, on the other hand, were just basically unhelpful. I get this feeling they hate working there--it's hard to say though. S remarked that it must be a job requirement that they're not allowed to smile. Ever. It's interesting to note they have a Good Humor vending machine in their lobby.

Anyhow, things went as they tend to go. It's really wild watching these people who participated watching the products of their weekends. Some are excited and really liked what they created. Others just hate it all. Some wax on about whose fault all the problems were.

It's interesting to note that almost all of the groups so far used a variation of Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro on a Mac. It's also interesting to note that Avid was one of the sponsors of the 48 hour film project.

This was the second (and last) group to be screened at the Brattle Theatre. It was a lot rowdier than last night. I'm not sure if that's because the groups were rowdier groups or that we had some ... technical issues.

One of the genres is "mockumentary". Last night we had a film that was very Christopher-Guest-ish which was really well done. After seeing that I figured that all the mockumentary films would be along those lines since there aren't too many other mockumentary films out there to derive the concept from. Tonight, however, was pretty different. I was pretty stunned to find out the guys who did it (their entire team was 4 guys--some of these teams had 25 people and org charts) decided to do it 2 or 3 days before the actual fest. That's pretty awesome.

Reminds me of this foreign exchange student that I knew back in college who decided to run the Boston Marathon at a party we threw the friday before. Then she ran it two days later and did just fine.

I digress. I got home around midnight again, grabbed some food, and then fell into a deep coma.

There's a song entitled Oh Yeah by Yello. It's a great song and I listen to it sometimes when I'm in one of those awesome feeling moods where I'm actually accomplishing things and my todo list is getting shorter as opposed to infinitely longer. Anyhow, I was thinking of writing some of the lyrics down and sending them via email to a friend, but when I write it down, it's totally unrecognizable and certainly doesn't get across the general feeling of the song.

But, hey--some songs are like that.

I wonder if folks who listen to symphony music have this problem. Do they resort to poetical descriptions? Something like this:

   Rachmaninoff Prelude in C# minor is so beautiful--it fills my heart with
   joyous melancholy!

Do they ever text message each other?

   Yo! Rach PinCS rox!

It reminds me of this project I've had for a long time. I've always wanted to implement a barbershop quartet on a mud. How can I programmatically get across the difference in quality between an experienced quartet and one that's just starting out to the audience? That sort of thing fascinates me. Sometimes people ask me what I'm thinking about when I'm staring off into space. I'm probably thinking about barbershop quartets in mud-space.

Excitement simmered in the air of the first screening at the Brattle Theatre like Mexican jumping beans in a popcorn popper.

I was elected Lead Usher by the organizational committee in a unanimous vote. I think they were really impressed by my platform speech which outlined my plan for total usher awesomeness [1].

I carried out my lead usher duties with precision--handing out ballots and pencils like a professional. I had a flashlight with me but never used it [2]. I don't think I'll be bringing one tonight. For the second show I just sat around and watched all my usher minions deviously performing their assigned usher duties.

I'm tired now. I think I got home at midnight and then ate some dinner and went to bed.

[1] I was the first usher to arrive--that might have helped as well.
[2] When I was preparing, I was envisioning one of those ushers with the flashlights pointing out free seats.

My brother is organizing the 48 hour film thingy in Boston which kicks off tonight! I'm helping out to usher and perform in secret kick-off rituals that I don't really understand but turn out to be vital to the doings and goings-on of the 48 hour film thingy!

Anyhow, if you're in the Boston area, there are four showings of the final films: two at the Brattle and two at the Somerville Theatre.

Lots of details and a half-naked picture of my brother HERE.

One interesting thing about this one is that it's Spring Forward this weekend--so they "extended" it an hour so that the groups don't lose an hour if that makes any sense. I think maybe one of my jobs will be to hand out extra hours at the door--one per group please!

I don't know what TypeKey is, but this article on TypeKey? You Blow Me not only doesn't help understand what it is but also ingeniously looks like a collage of luser rhetoric that could be (and typically is) applied to almost anything to sway someone for or against something. This is a really elegant piece of writing.

1. It's a shame I can't somehow use the amazing amount of heat being generated by my computer which is doing regression tests to drive a humidifier. I think if I had the processor fan blowing the hot air across a dish of water, I wouldn't have to have a noisy processor fan AND a noisy humidifier in my cube.
2. The Groovy project is very well-named.

"stay strong, stay in school, say no to drugs, say yes to hugs, say maybe to bugs, and finish all of your work, so you can have a nice relaxing time with S tomorrow. (see you get wise wisdom from the oldest resident of homer)"

I'm busy fixing issues with my registry plugin. It's highly configurable which of course makes it mildly flakey. Bleh.

updated to remove someone's name.

Today was one of those weird New England days where every weatherman was right--didn't even matter what they predicted. On the drive to work it was overcast. At around noon it was snowing with heavy gusts of wind that made the snow go horizontal. At like 2, the snow had turned to rain. At 5, it was sunny and while there were a few clouds dotting the sky in wispy trails, there wasn't any evidence of rain or gusty snow. Wacky.

I keep getting into the classic "your language sucks; mine is better" discussions with various people. Regardless of what they say, I still like Python, C, sort-of like Perl and dislike Java. Some day when I have a free moment or two, I'll remember/learn enough SML/Lisp to like that again as well.

Link to Every Language War Ever

On Friday, I sat down at my desk at work, put my coffee mug down, and went to scratch my eyebrow when suddenly the lens fell out of my glasses and the tiniest screw in the universe dropped almost unnoticeably to the desk in a beautiful swan dive. This surprised me greatly and led to three different epiphanies:

1. It's hard to fix your glasses when you can't use your glasses because they need fixing.
2. When a jewelers screwdriver isn't handy, a paperclip can do--but poorly. For some reason no one has a jewelers screwdriver handy which is a shame. All mine were at home and I was at the office. I was able to screw the tiniest screw ever using the edge of a paperclip while squinting so much I was in that funky limbo between where I couldn't see because I wasn't wearing my glasses and I couldn't see because I was squinting so much trying to adjust for not wearing my glasses because that's what I was trying to fix. Anyhow, I fixed it enough that I was able to get home.
3. When you ask someone for a jewelers screwdriver (which they don't have) they show you all the stuff they do have which might (but really doesn't) suffice. People have a lot of weird stuff at work.

Anyhow, I was amused to discover that Ted also had vision problems. We're like TWINS!!!

I got home today and totally forgot to fix my glasses until I had been sitting here for 10 minutes staring at this weird bug I found (or thought I found) in PyBlosxom that was happening in one of my blogs but not the other. The PATH_INFO for the url http://blog/george/sophia showed up (incorrectly) as "/blog/george/sophia.txt" and for the other showed up (correctly) as "/blog/george/sophia" Both blogs were configured almost identically, so I was perplexed. Then I realized that it was just me doing something totally stupid. That's when I remembered that I had to fix my glasses. So I pulled out one of my jewelers screwdriver kit (I have several--one of which I should bring to the office) and pulled out a perfect screwdriver, fixed my glasses and marvelled at how a screwdriver of the right size can make all the difference in the world.

To summarize, my glasses are fixed, I fixed my configuration, PyBlosxom doesn't have a bizarre PATH_INFO bug, and I learned that a paperclip can be used as a quick fix.

I explicitly make a habit of not reading Slashdot and especially not reading the comments. However, I saw this on boingboing and it is pretty amusing and clever and I figured I'd post it here in case people I know didn't see it.

Roses are #FF0000 Violets are #0000FF chown -R you ~/base

KillerHamster in a /. comment

Gary Gygax was a special guest voice on Futurama (an episode I hadn't seen before) and I just watched it! My life is now complete--that was wicked cool.

Every now and then I'm writing a really super wonderful fantastic amazingly useful bit of code and suddenly the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I get goosebumps and I wonder if this bit of code is a little too fantastic... a little too wonderful and useful.... Is this bit of code going to become SkyNet and end the human race as we know it?

• You can bring your work home with you and sit on the deck and sip iced tea while working on stuff.
• When the power goes off in the building and everyone around you does a cry of despair, you can keep doing stuff.
• You can sit on the couch, you can sit on a lawn chair, you can sit in your bed, you can sit at a desk, you can sit on the bus, you can sit on the plane, you can sit on the train, you can sit on the floor, you can sit beside a door, you can sit outside, you can sit inside, you can sit in the mall, you can sit in the hall....

I've just been reminded that some people say the glass is exactly twice as large as it needs to be. Smart-asses.

I think this expression is overused. Personally, I don't think anyone gives a damn whether the cup is half full or half empty--it's wholly uninteresting.

Now whether someone is half-naked or half-dressed--either way it's interesting and tells you a whole lot about someone.

Hell no!

Of course, that's not much of an argument, so I'll quote from someone who puts it all in perfect perspective:

   "They're SD Sailor scouts, for Pete's sake! Nobody fights crime on 'e'. 
   You hug it, jump around like a moron and quietly brain-bleed for a few 
   hours after the hydrogen peroxide effect kicks in. Sheesh. If the PPG 
   girls were taking 'e', they'd be more like hyper Care Bears with that 
   popular 'strug-out Monday' look. Subtle difference, I realize, but you 
   don't see too many well delivered flying kicks at the average rave."

   Fantastic Lad (kuro5hin.org)

I think that covers the issue very nicely.

At least, I thought it was a bee. It might have been a yellow jacket. It was flying by too fast for me to tell the difference. I should tell my friend Jerome. He's allergic to bees. He has some kind of funky bee radar--he knows where they are before they're within sight/hearing range. He'll put his hand calmly on my arm and say, "There's a bee over there." To which I respond, "Where?" And then he'll quietly say, "Beyond that building." And I'll say, "What building? That monstrosity of a building over there which people refer to as Gilette Stadium?--that one?" "Yeah. If we're quiet, though, maybe it won't come over here." Weirdo.

I finally got around to buying new strings for my guitar and restringing it. The guitar sounds totally different now. I'm not entirely sure whether I like it better now or better before, but I do know that I'm not going to change the strings a couple more times to find out.

Enough of this media blitz on outsourcing! In some cases it works, in others its a tragic tragic tragic choice to make. I've heard lots of anecdotal evidence of the latter kind and one anecdote of the former.

Here's my big plan. I think we should outsource _everything_: manufacturing, software, services, travel arrangements, floral arrangements, bridal arrangements, car service, customer service, no-service customer service, todo lists, grocery lists, top ten lists, music reviews, movie reviews, ... you name it, let's outsource it!

Then maybe they'll become so overwhelmed that they'll outsource back to us! Woo hoo!

Iy'd figgivuly to typr ehrn yout lrgy hsnf id ogg by onr kry.

That regexp haiku I wrote a while back is on Java.net Today.

I\shave\s(?:obsession)+
with\sregular\s(?:expression)+
in\sthe\s(fall|spring)

It's all true. Even the lies.

Wari has been noticing some scaling issues with entries. Of course, I don't notice anything like that since I only have like 73 entries (as of the time of this writing). So I hereby commence my effort to create oodles of useless chatter in order to better test out PyBlosxom. I will call this Project Content. All such chatter will go into the content category.

I highly suggest using the categories on the right side thing there to help in discerning the silly filler from the real content. You know. Important things like Lyntin status (3.3--working on 4.0).

The title of this entry comes from this funny story in college. This dude was in the DEClab with us and we're all quietly typing away working on whatever it is we were working on. Then he stands up all of a sudden and slams his hand on the desk (WHACK!) and says in this thick Eastern Bloc accent, "NEEEDS MORRRE MEMOREEE!"

It doesn't look so funny written down but my friend Chris does this imitation of it that's got to be criminal. Hilarity ensues.

What does it mean? Silly it seems?
But it's true from a certain point of view!

Yes. I know someone who has bought caffeinated soap. There are 200 milligrams per serving.

My brother sent me this. I responded with this.

Then my brother sent me this url which allows me to make my own comics without blatantly manipulating the querystring.

So I created this.

Will the bashful Rainbow Sprites win back their pot of gold from the grasp of the evil Ice Cream Man? You decide!

I'm going to California for a few days and I'm going to spend the time hanging with old friends, eating, drinking, long nights of narcisstic debauchery, and wild crazy intellectual conversations with friends like Jack and Jim just like old times.

I think it's also going to rain on Saturday. We shall see....

I'm collecting statistical data about what people think about various professions in regards to honesty, contribution to community, respect, and various other aspects for personal curiosity. I'd appreciate anyone who reads this to take 5 minutes and help out by completing the survey. All data is collected anonymously and is for private purposes only.

Thanks muchly!

click here for the survey

you shouldn't bring a sleeping bag and you shouldn't bring food. She's got a futon and she's also planning on getting extra pillows. Additionally, if we run out of food we can always go out to eat or go out and get more food.

"Well, I woke up Sunday morning
With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt.
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad,
So I had one more for dessert.
Then I fumbled in my closet through my clothes
And found my cleanest dirty shirt.
Then I washed my face and combed my hair
And stumbled down the stairs to meet the day."
-- Kris Kristofferson, Sunday Morning Coming Down

This guy must have been a developer--he just described my morning routine.

Dixon Ticonderoga 1388-2 Soft. Anything else is pointless.

H sent me some p's of G+D's w. So I unzipped them and dumped them on my www because I figured it might be easier viewing.

If you're the kind of person who wants to view such things, you could do so here.

Well, it was cold, but they were pretty! Though not as numerous as last year when we went up to Middlebury, VT to watch them. This year we watched them in my parents' back yard using the house cleverly to block the moon.

I had one friend who told me to take pictures. I don't have that kind of picture taking equipment, though, so instead I offer up a link to other peoples' pictures.

Oo--cake please!

The Boston Marathon is an old tradition in the heart of Boston. The actual course runs by such places as Boston College (my alma mater) and Wellesley. Over the last bunch of years, I've sat on the course and cheered for passers by. I've also observed what have come to be known in an incredibly exclusive circle (namely myself) as the 10 rules to running the marathon:

Read more...

Coding for me is a craft. I feel that I am a craftsman. My tools and design are intricate pieces in a harmony--a zenning out (to quote Tom Christiansen)--that touches my soul. The design, the creation, then I breathe life into my work. The sweet aromas of the debugging cycle where you become intimately aware of the inner workings. The subtle details.

This is programming as a craft. It is different from programming as a method of deriving income. For a lucky few these two can be entwined. But often the act of working as part of a development team for a client against a deadline creates an atmosphere where the creation of beauty must take a back seat for the purposes of teamwork and responsibility and producing a product that meets the customers' often haphazard and contrary-minded expectations.

But this is ok. This is as it was in the days of yore when the blacksmith would shoe your horses, then spend hours by his anvil doing intricate ironwork for gates and statues.

To keep yourself in the tao, don't be frustrated when you can't coax the beauty in every thing you do. Some things have beauty and some have functionality, and some are a total bs hack you did when you were drunk and it was late and the deadline was yesterday and you're just hoping that it doesn't cause your computer to crash before you can fully compile and check the new code in.

Coding is an adventure in formal logic and intellectual pointedness. As in anything else, the more you know and have experienced, the easier things get. I want to hit the point where I have seen so much in my lifetime that I can come across any new problem and after applying a sufficiently complex isomorphism understand the new problem in terms of older problems. That's the goal. Of course understanding and solving the problem don't necessarily play on the same team.

Programming is not so much like building a tower of metal and steel. It is more like looking at the canvas for long periods of time. Visualizing the stroke--the single stroke that you will place there. You think through all the motions involved in the stroke. How it fits with the canvas. How it fits with the world. The curves in the stroke, the straightness. And then suddenly, you draw that perfect stroke. But it involves seeing the whole canvas to begin with.

Beautiful programming is a lot of meditation and thinking and about precise deft strokes, not a bazillion tiny little hacks that barely form a structure that can withstand use and abuse.

But beautiful programming does not happen in practice and it's not efficient in the sense that the initial cost is really high--even though maintenance and related costs would be low.

How does one reconcile this with business and society and work? One tries to keep this in mind. To keep patience in the soul as they build and debug and observe and analyze. All things happen because they are written in the code as such. It is our jobs to make deft accurate strokes rather than practice black magic and voodoo and make a billion inaccurate strokes in a frustrating attempt to solve the problem quickly.

Of course, as with all things, there is a time and place for voodoo debugging.

I just found writing programs really cool. We started out with a Vector and I started playing Invaders and Deadline. Then I played Zork and Leather Goddesses of Phobos and King's Quest and Space Quest and the first Microsoft Flight Simulator and Epyx Winter Games and Decathalon and ....

And then I was like, "I wonder how they write stuff like this." And then I discovered this tome we had that we used to keep the printer balanced because it was missing a foot. It was called IBM Basic. And I read it and started writing my own games and stuff. Then I learned QBasic and a bit of basica and then the first version of Visual Basic (which was horrid--ugh) for Windows. I started solving problems with computers and programming.

I used to read magazines on the subject, and various conference papers my dad would bring back from his little trips. I learned about hardware, IRQs, DMAs, and such (becuase you had to know them to get any game working at all). I think my dad was the first reseller of 3Com equipment in the Northeast. I knew lots of folks at my dad's work that were doing the computer thing. Then I hit high school and poked around with hacking games and BBSs. At college, I hit Macintosh and Unix and lived in the computer lab, became a tutor, then ran the computer lab a few years later. I got my MCSE (it wasn't hard). I learned a bazillion languages. I read RFCs, I wrote my own web-server in C, I toyed with MTAs for a bit, I read about IP stacks and network security and firewalls and proxy servers. I learned about compilers and graphics routines and compression algorithms. I slipped on a rock and fell on my ass and accidentally learned HTML while walking home from dinner one day. I learned CGI programming from the NCSA site. I started mudding. I got on a project building our own mud server, driver, and lib. I took over a mud client project called Lyntin and written entirely in Python.

So on so forth.

Course, the other side of the story is this. I had no athletic skills to become an athlete. I dislike biological fluids, so medicine was out of the question. Law irritates me--and many people who practice law irritate me more. Political Science is anything but a science. Chemistry and Math and Physics were really cool--wish I had taken more in college. Art is wonderful, but I disagreed with the professors as to why people do art--though I still draw and paint and such. Music is also wonderful--and I still play a variety of instruments. Great books were trippy--Jesuit professors are amazing folk. Theology was interesting. Philosophy was neat as well. Teaching will be nice some time down the road.

And that's the story. Course, it could have just been symptoms of heavy iron deposits in the water I drank as a kid.

To slack is to exert laziness as a philosophical outlook for the purposes of problem solving. Pretty much it waters down to, "Aw, hell. Does it have to be that complicated?"

Some of the best things in the computer industry came about from this point of view: "What if I were to build this doo-hicky that would automate that whole key-punching thing because repetitive key punching sucks....?"

Course, to ponder on this any more would be too much effort. And I'm busy working on this thing....

There has been a long list of things that have moved me. Like when you're playing harmonics on a guitar, the other notes vibrate in sympathy. While I don't recall why I originally added this topic to my on stuff list, it's one of those topics that's easy to come up with one or two things on the spur of the moment--and then spend the rest of your life thinking about.

I think the things that move me the most tend to be sudden and unexpected and usually while I'm busy trying to get something done. Rarely do I find things that move me while I'm sitting still enjoying the placitudes. Sometimes it's a connection. A sudden realization of an isomorphic mapping of a group of things that allow me some insight as to the relation of the items in the group. Course, I'm talking about items in the non-thing sense--they could just as easily be feelings or thoughts or visual abstractions.

Maybe someday I'll reach a point where it's important to make a list of the things that have moved me. Partly because I require moving again, or maybe because the list will move me and bring insight as to the things that move me. I guess, kind of a meta-moving.

For the first time in my life I own a printer. I have avoided getting one like I avoid getting the clap... Actually, avoiding the clap is pretty easy since in order to get the clap, I would have to significantly alter my lifestyle. Unless there's some new mutation of the clap that can be passed through attachments over the Internet. Until such a mutation of the clap exists, I will never even come close to getting it.

Where was I? Oh. Printers. I just got a sweet laser printer. HP Laserjet 2100 for about $700 or so. You might ask why I didn't get a Bubblejet or a Deskjet for cheaper price. And I'll tell you. But only if you buy me some more hummus because I don't have any because I ate it all.

One doesn't drink coffee in the morning because one is thirsty, or because it provides nutritional value, or because one enjoys it, or because one is hooked. Rather it is a chance to revel in life--to enjoy its dark and bitter waters, the acidic aftertaste. Then, and only then, you know that your day couldn't possibly be that bad and you gain in the strength to go on.... One more step.... One more day of tedium.

And it helps to focus for some reason. I find I think twice as fast and twice as focused after a good meal and a couple of cups of coffee. If you skip the meal, then you just get a super caffeine high which lasts some 15 minutes and then you burn out. But whatever.

So there is a balance involved in drinking coffee. A balance of solid and liquid. Of drink and eat. Like the natural flows of the universe.

There is a certain macho factor too. Like when I'm working, I don't want a mamby-pamby cup of starbucks or green mountain coffee! I want a cup of coffee made from dirt. I want to put my spoon in my coffee and have full confidence that it will stand up in the coffee and not touch any of the sides. The coffee should be either scalding hot, or arctic cold. It should be black as night, bitter, and mildly acidic. You should be able to use the same cup of coffee to take the rust off your car.

Tom Christiansen wrote an article thingy about efficiency of keyboards as an input device and how it sucks. The reason for suckage is that since keyboards differ from each other, and often were designed under premises that functionality and efficiency should take a backseat to making the Enter key bigger and the space bar smaller. It's a good article. Anyhow, it talks about zenning out whilst programming. The layers between your thinking about your code, translating that into design, translating that design into functions and code, translating that into a series of instructions that you send your fingers which then type a bunch of stuff in... All that collapses into your mind and your design.

Frequently in science fiction there will be some dude with a set of vr goggles on and special gloves and they will manipulate virtual objects as if the objects were really in the space in front of the dude. It's kind of cheesy. But that's how zenning out feels. You lose track of your environment and time. Your senses fall asleep as you manipulate this virtual design in your mind of how your program works. As you manipulate it, it grows and reacts. You forget that you're typing on a keyboard. You forget to blink to keep your eyes moist.

I forget to eat and often that my body needs maintenance. This is zenning out. Then suddenly you wake up and your systems come back online and you become aware again of the world around you and your eyes hurt and you're starving and your cup of coffee has been ice cold and half full for hours.

And that is bliss. And it's even cooler when I understand what I've just written and doubly-cooler if it works.

I spent a lot of time in the computer science lab at Boston College.

Let me rephrase that. I spent a _lot_ of time in the DEClab. I used to sleep in the DEClab semi-regularly. I worked there, played there, socialized there (yes, I know...), and occasionally did other stuff there.

I have a lot of fond memories of that time and the people I spent the time with. Too many to write here. In the declab, someone once wrote on the white board "My karma ran over my dogma."

That pretty much sums up my long stay in the DEClab.