i finished reading a walk in the woods by bill bryson the other day and it was SUCH a good book. half the time you are laughing out loud from the shit that bryson and katz get into and the other amount of the times you are learning about the appalachian trail and feeling a desire to go hike it yourself grow inside of you. i highly recommend it.
i also finished reading stiffed: the betrayal of the american man last week. it's a very interesting read, possibly one of the more "heavy" books i've read in a while. it gives some real insight into the world of our fathers and their father's and leaves me wondering if when i'm 30 i'll feel the same betrayal and longing as the men in this book. +5 on this one.

i finished reading the te of piglet today and found it very enjoyable, i read the first book, the tao of pooh last semester one boring calculus class. one thing that i find appealing about taoism/buddhism/other-"hip"-eastern-religions is that they are very no non-sense. there's nothing you read when you read about them that strikes you as "out there" or something that you must take a leap of faith to accept; it's just a great collection of stuff we already know in it's purest form, atleast for me ?
today and yesterday i wrote a fun little program to tell me the best way to spent my points on AGENTS, it's basically a simple "making change" program but it was fun to write. and it was useful to get my mind back on programming in lisp, not just thinking about it.

HyperFRED looks pretty neat.

so common lisp sockets are pretty nonportable (between different implementations) right? i was thinking about plan 9 and in plan 9 you interact with sockets via files in your namespace - including starting them and controling them. because they are just files, you could interact with them easily from common lisp since it's fairly good at files/streams.
the only problem of course is that now your code is portable to different implementations but not off of plan 9 :(

Every day I check freshmeat.net and look over what has been released that day. When I do this I go through and "ignore" the projects that I am not interested in. The idea is that eventually that site will only contain news about software that I care about. However, new projects that I don't care about get added about as fast as I can ignore the one's I've seen already.
i don't know if this is good or bad for the open source world.

An interesting interview of Moxie by Luke Ford.

i was looking through the archives of moxie's site and i found this entry pondering about love. and this is my reply.#

you are the patsy to my kline
i'm not the same without you
alone i'm barely an outline
and you know you feel the same too#

what is not so important
is how long our bodies have been together
what's really important
is that i feel like i've known you forever#

words can't express what this means
the only one who can announce it
is my heart, not the crotch of my jeans
another not, love is more than habit#

whatever love really is to me
it's something you'll only see
when your heart is the key
to the lock of our life's mystery#

later i found this other entry about how moxie needed a boyfriend. moxie, if i had read your blog back then i would have jumped upon this chance because i'd be the best boyfriend you've ever had.#

even for no reason
i'd buy you flowers everyday
even they were out of season#

Tony Pierce on his favourite magazine: "Black Webmaster used to ask questions like name three things better than two blonde girls in harley outfits going down on you as you drink a beer from a bottle with led zeppelin going after taking a nice pull from a four footer?"

nice blog from mpt, one part is very nice: "...Thus, you have people making snide remarks about George W Bush?s unelectedness, avenging his father, supporting oil companies, et cetera ad nauseum,..." - it seems to me like when many people try and criticize bush they target personal things about him or quirks and only spend a small percentage of the time actually challenging his ideas and his motives. mpt brings up a nice point that although most of this criticism is thoughtful and fact-backed it is not very constructive because it doesn't suggest an alternative; it merely challenges the current script and says "bad bad bad, oh and bush, you're an idiot." it just seems like the wrong way to go about it.
the xfree86 thing is interesting. i think it's pretty infantile for "the open source community" to try and police and tell other projects what to do. the xfree86 and core team shouldn't be criticized for disagreeing with a core team member and kicking them out, it's their projects, it's their right to decide who's in and who's out. and it's not like they told him he couldn't do the fork, they just said it won't be official.
US Senator Robert Byrd is an awesome senator: "We flaunt our superpower status with arrogance. We treat UN Security Council members like ingrates who offend our princely dignity by lifting their heads from the carpet. Valuable alliances are split.
After war has ended, the United States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America's image around the globe."
read micheal moore's site today: "5. Of the 535 members of Congress, only ONE (Sen. Johnson of South Dakota) has an enlisted son or daughter in the armed forces! If you really want to stand up for America, please send your twin daughters over to Kuwait right now and let them don their chemical warfare suits. And let's see every member of Congress with a child of military age also sacrifice their kids for this war effort. What's that you say? You don't THINK so? Well, hey, guess what -- we don't think so either!"
kuro5hin article on a commander's words
advertising is so sad.... "Are you considering a career in advertising?", "If so, kill yourself"

surana is sadly right saying that all programmers are idiots. this is perhaps why certain types of langauges are so successful; namely the ones that protect programmers from themselves and force than to do stupid things (so that they avoid doing REALLY stupid things) [ie java] and languages that are so banal that it's normally impossible to do them wrong [ie visualbasic]. not that these languages (and programmers) never produce anything valuable... more that that is the exception rather than the rule.
i once read that java was a programming language designed for bad programmers. can't recall where though...
interestingly enough i was referred to Extreme Success from lemonodor.com; which is about extreme programming. i've never "extremely programmed" because i work alone designing and implementing everything at work. but i do use some extreme programming practices to help keep me honest: unit tests, always working code, low overhead, etc. if and when i start working with others i plan on pushing extreme programming for larger teams.

Tim O'Reilly on Apple's role as an Innovator: "They have a really great sense of where technology is going. Microsoft's slogan "Where do you want to go today?" may be apposite -- Apple is great at asking "Where do you want to go tomorrow?" and helping to take the industry there."#

Last week's LWN: Kernel Development report talks some interesting words about the new FUTEXs, they seem pretty neat. Fast equals good.#

Dan Sugalaski's take on the Big Dig. Basically he thinks it's amazing and he thinks it's astounding that "We, on the other hand, can't manage to build a PC operating system that doesn't suck dead badgers through 12" metal conduit." Wonderful.#

Jack Schofield talks about the "Programmable Web" and what that future means to "The World", via Matt Jones#

Tony Pierce gives advice to women: "chicks always think they have to get skinnier. chicks dont need to get any skinnier. they need to get smarter. not book smarter either. just smarter smarter."#

from an article on kerneltrap, andrea arcangeli suggest that users should employ a non-broken design to have good i/o performance rather than the kernel jumping through hoops for them. if only the real world would be so kind? this seems like an example of 'designing for idiots'
i read the NBC article from kuro5hin and comparing what it says about biological(?) weapons to what living terrors had to say about it when i read it i'm not sure... although in living terrors the people DO panic... hmm
read the piece about newton's predictions of the end of the world. lots of scientists who are great have eccentric hobbies and just because their science is great doesn't necessary extend to everything else
awesome quote from paul graham from a ll1-discuss post in response to "why not just take Common Lisp and *fix* it!" : "Do you have any idea how long the future is? Do you really think people in 1000 years want to be constrained by hacks that got put into the foundations of Common Lisp because a lot of code at Symbolics depended on it in 1988?"
paul graham is someone you can never get tired of reading stuff he writes :)
erp.

a new crypto-gram is out and there's some interesting insights of "cyberterrorism" and my favourite linkage of the paper, "Attacking Virtual Machines with Memory Errors", so clever.#

howard dean clears up his position on the death penalty, and he seems like a decent guy.#

tony pierce will never be vegetarian, at least not just because pamela anderson wants him to. i think pamela anderson should make love to me because i'm a nice vegan boy and i'll treat her right, we can have a ranch with cute aminals and stuff. wee.
his faux girlfriend sounds pretty awesome and picking up girls while you're pissing on dumpsters is bad ass#

an interesting article on kuro5hin about the many ways to categorize political opinions, the whole three dimensional aspect is interesting and new to me.#

the ten commandments of weblogging are funny.#

tidbits from joel on cover letters and other stuff, i've never had to write a cover letter... i wonder what i would put on it? i'd probably say something like joel says you should said and do a little point-by-point proving of why i'm the best for the job based on what the job description is.#

a funny series about dumb things video game companies have done. a great read: about ET on the Atari sucking.. "About all Designer Howard Scott Warshaw could say was, "The game had to be done in five weeks, so you did it. What you did was design a game you could do in five weeks ... and, you know -- well, they didn't return all of 'em." "#

kent pitman: `` When I'm old and grey and look back on my life, I want to have done a lot of interesting things, not just have done a few interesting things but "boy were they fast". '' - old interview

pragmatic dave talks about an interesting idea on how to run debates and discuss things. the whole idea of forcing people to understand the other's side by having them defend it is appealing.#

moxie is a lucky girl. when i was younger a friend and i used to drive around a lot and we were really cheap so we often had to push the car a few blocks to get to a gas station to fill it up, although it wasn't really a loving push, it was a more abusive relationship. we'd torture the car as much as possible. i think my ways would different if i drove a beautiful porsche or if i were a beautiful girl like moxie.#

tony pierce finds the way to supreme blogdom through zazen and comes back punching with some saddening stories of sadness.#

an okay interview with hans reiser on slashdot. someone at my work was actually talking about what an ass he is today, because he'd spent time with him at a conference. (in reference to question 10)#

An interesting story about an old drunk guy at dive into mark, it makes me not look forward at all to getting my first apartment/place/etc.#

Moxies writes open letters to dumb people she knows.#

Dan Sugalaski goes over why he originally wanted Parrot's DOD to work one way and has ended up switching to a different mechanism closer to Perl 5's system.#

VentureBlog responds to Joel's criticism, saying that some businesses shouldn't take the money - and they even use Joel's advice in an older article to support some of their responses. (also, Cisco is linked as a company that started with VC, so some real businesses use it, that's good.)#

A little practical note about putting source code in books from Pragmatic Dave, interesting.#

Moxie writes about what could have been a good story and what was missing from it. I think the idea of the story is clever. I recommend the comments for the real details and quality. Moxie also links an article about the new Hollywood religious trend, "Kabbalahlicious".#

Tony Pierce lovingly recalls his ex-girlfriend "Michelle with one L" and how it was her birthday that day. It reminds of girls that I've been with who had good parents, I think it's important to have good relations with the Rentals... don't know why, but all my favourite girlfriends had cool parents. For some reason Tony linked me as well? My heart glows. Later Tony blogged about fat punk rock girls, raymi, AND rush limbaugh. How does he do it?#

Analogy Fest papers via Peter Lindberg.#

Christians against Bush on Kuro5hin.org: "Turn the Other Cheeck, George"#

Mark Fisher on the "literature" of software. "It's not the language, it's the community".#

Philip Greenspun reflects on differences between Israel and the USA. And how it isn't as bad as it's cracked out to be.#

Kim links Robert Martin on how 90% of programming work is done by 10% of the programmers, and Kim reflects in more detail why this is so and offers suggestion to remedy the problem. I can say that I write 100% of the code I work with.#

Shit, Safari just died and I lost all the other windows I had open... How did this happen?#

A new version of OmniWeb based on WebCore is out, sheeeat.#

I think I recovered those lost blog entries I meant to read, weee for NetNewsWire making the ones I clicky red.#

Dan Sugalaski sums up what is Garbage Collection. Deliciously GC.#

Tom Coates doesn't like everything I don't like about other people RSS feeds. Although axiomatic, he doesn't mention when people don't have RSS feeds. I want to read your site but I don't want to have to think about it.#

hitting on people on their blog's comments is pretty funny....
read about k5-ism, hah!
wonderful!

There is a new weekly edition of LWN, so that means that the last week's is free! Not really much interesting in the Kernel section besides a few lists of things that are currently wrong with the Linux kernel now. One list being what should be fixed for 2.6 and one being what should be fixed in general for high performance "Carrier-Grade" environments. The Development section linked an article on the new "Berkeley DB XML." Now I'm a big fan of BDB, and I always have been, but I have to same I'm a bit skeptical of a BDB Buzzword solution. We'll see...#

A new Apple Complaint over at Sci-Fi Hi-Fi. This one is about how having Al Gore on the Board of Directors is nothing more than getting famous people on a Board, while it should actually do something more. Linked here is an article about the country's top worst boards. A fun read.#

So to avoid continuing to cause an uproar with civil liberties folks the "Total Information Awareness" program has been changed to the "Terrorism Information Awareness" program. Genius! (via x.blog)#

The RDF.net Challenge looks very interesting and it provides a nice little background on how RDF came to be.#

Will at Will.Whim explains why the machines in the Matrix simply cannot win. He also talks about what seems to be a very funny practice of Kalamazoo College. Read it.#

There is discuss on LL1-discuss about how auto-conversion and auto type coercion is Bad (tm) and that because perl goes crazy with it, it is bad too. I think that I agree with most of the people who fight against perl, even though we are in love, because I've had lots of problems with it in the past and I'm not a big fan of things that are confusion and special cases to languages. You can read the threads over at the archive, although the discussion is hidden under the "another take on hackers and painters" thread, but I think everyone should subscribe to this list, it's the best.#

Peter Lindberg writes about becoming a better programmer: "I was once in a project where there was a very experienced team member, and some people — even relatively experienced ones — didn't dare to say what they thought out of humility. Inexperienced people sometimes come up with brilliant ideas because their vision isn't blurred by past experience (again, it's the notion that the first ideas that come to you are stale)." - Beginner's Mind is Goood!#

I think mpt is a skilled user interface critic because the Internet cafe he works in is frequented by less than skilled people, using terrible software, and because of this he sees every problem out there.#

There's an article on kuro5hin.org about the possibility of Israel putting in an application to become part of the European Union. It's an interesting article and it supplies some editorializing on this article from the UPI. A good read, although topics like this seem "too big" for me to add anything too.#

Another interesting Op-Ed on Frankenfood or Genetically Modified crops. I personally wish there were more testing because I feel uneasy about it but I think that it's something that once harnessed with be vital to the future of the human race, although hopefully not at the expense of other life on this planet.#

And another about the continual issue of "Mad Cow Disease." Now I don't eat meat so I'm not worried but if I were I wouldn't be as worried as some people are.#

I love Tony Pierce's fake interviews with people I don't know of, because even though I have no clue it's still HILARIOUS.#

There's more than a few stories about the Buffy finale. *sniff*#

russ ross on ll1-discuss: "It has been said before that the availability of many ... tools is the most compelling argument in favor of Java, not the language itself. If we are discussing language features and their suitability for certain tasks, saying that the task has already been solved so that language must be as good as any other is a pretty unconvincing argument."
when talking about languages objectively in the academic/technological way the above is sound, but in the business world the whole picture of languages, libraries, and tools must be considered if you are concerned with making money and rapid deployment.
i'm pumped for joel's new article on monday
green hat journal mentions a better way of handling multiprocessing with continuations, i have not read what he linked yet, but i shall
HAH!
the "down and out in the magic kingdom" interview makes me want to read the book
interesting

http://www.masterninja.com is back up and it's new look is pretty gross but i'm glad to get some ninja styled comedy back in my Internet Experience(tm).
read "The Essence of Compiling Exceptions" which was linked by lamba the ultimate and found that is was fairly interesting. i've not really programmed much in the way of exceptions or compilers but i can appreciated the effort in formalizing and proving methods to compile exceptions. when i start doing more interesting work i hope that i can provide such thorough and concise documents.
downloaded many more papers but have yet to categorize or read them. eventually i will write commentary for all of them (that I read :)
read The Software Developer as Movie Icon linked from SLASHDOT and thought that the students he mentioned remind me a lot of the kids that are in the cs program i'm at. most of them focus on doing the least amount of work required to get by and don't care if their code is elegant or thoughtful because it will be thrown away promptly and they think they are being "macho" solo programmers you pull all nighters and get the job done. that may be how SOME software is developed, but that kind of software is BAD software.
as subversion prepares for a new release i grow weary of having to update the server at my work and do backup of all the databases.... if only backing up were less annoying?

i've been away from the computer for 2 or so days and i have so much email and websites to read, i feel like i will be crushed under their weight.
i recently signed up for ll1-discuss mailing list and after only two days i think it's the most thought provoking, intelligent list i've ever been on. i recommend signing up for it.
on that list, the post from Sundar Narasimhan <sundar@ascent.com> titled, "Re: Industry versus academia" which talks about how people on the list talk to down programmers reminds of one of paul graham's articles on design where he says that when people design for themselves they create good pieces of work but when they design for those who they feel are less intelligent the product will not be as good. if you are trying to make something for someone else you should focus on what you have in common and what you can understand about that person's problem - not what separates the two of you and makes you "better". this is a part, i think, of the what the whole "XP use cases/users stories" is about because it makes the designers recognize that they don't know what the users want and need so they accept it and bring in a customer to help them and treat that person as an equal.
on the subversion mailinglist there was much talk about when to use transactions and checkpoints in accessing the berkleydb. i currently use bdb alot in my perl code and i am very upset about how terrible the perl api is, there is lots of functionality missing and it's difficult to tune many things. i have long considered redoing to be more sensible. right now i just have a wrapper library that does some okay stuff but i'd like to use the full power of the library. sigh.
read "Automatic detection and repair of data structures" and thought it was pretty interesting. lots of systems contain consistency checking that may or maynot get run periodically (either by automatic or other wise means) but it is generally not trivial to create these checking procedures. having a simple (perhaps automated) way of doing this would be very interesting and beneficial to software in general. i imagine a "programming langauge" (or at least a runtime of a current language) that guarentees that objects are never corrupt by deriving the check/repair procedures from their definitions.
the whole project steve thing is pretty funny. it upset me in high school when teachers didn't understand or want to teach evolution. although it was a policy of the school... just dumb teachers.
brownsauce and brownsauce are pretty interesting. i wouldn't say i'm one of those who's incredibly buzzwordy or semantic webby but i think it's a very neat idea that when developed will make the web much more usuable.

the thread on ll1-discuss about the usefullness buisness-wise of academic programming langauges advances is going alone quite nicely. it is essentially debating about whether or not current langauges and environments are "good enough" and if the advances that are being made in academia are useful for making a better langauge for business types. at my own company i am constantly using higher level langauges and concepts but i'd say that we are an exception rather than rule when it comes to having a good place to apply them. i agree with many people on the list who say they are essentially for doing large complex projects properly, but have the disadvantage of being harder to learn/adapt to and thus are not always the best choice for arbitrary projects.
all this talk of learning new langauges and what remind me of learning lisp. i've spent 90% of my programming life programming application perl (i like to make the distinction between application and cgi perl) and the rest doing other ALGOL family langauges (basic, c, pascal, etc; in the early days.) during all that time there was this great mystique about lisp and how great it was and how "real" computer scientists wrote in it. i believed this but i did not know why it was so good until i studied it. upon studying and writing it i came to love and appreciate it and now i look for oppurtunities to use it as much as possible. i also can back up the saying that:

"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot." - Paul Graham in Beating the Averages

because i really do feel like a better programmer and i constantly use lisp concepts even when i'm not doing lisp.
read the kuro5hin diary entry about analog and it prompts me to go install analog on this server like i've been meaning to anyways. speaking of software installation a new version of moveabletype is out.. perhaps time to upgrade?
i read this article by Michael D. Crawford, and re-affirm my belief the VC's are scum bags; thank god for the internet crash so you don't hear about them as much any more, i'd NEVER take their money.

looked at interesting app called zoe linked from ec, it looks like a neat idea. i enjoy the concept of having everything i need at my fingertips
this from green hat reminds me why C# is so silly.

Tony Pierce on having sex with hot Danish blogging fans. Soooo envious.#

Halley links an article called "The New Gender Gap" that talks about how young men and boys now seemed to be being oppressed and not achieving as much as women these days. My favorite part is that talk about Ritalin: "The U.S. -- mostly its boys -- now consumes 80% of the world's supply of methylphenidate (the generic name for Ritalin). That use has increased 500% over the past decade, leading some to call it the new K-12 management tool." - It's sad.#

A new RPGamer editorial page is out. One editorial is about "Cencorship" in video games and discusses that difference between Translation and Localization. I'd say that I agree very much with the author although I would suggest the ability to have the content rating that can be set on consoles like the PS2 be read by the games and adjusted accordingly when the 'M' rated content just supplements the experience. That way I can play the M version because I don't care and you can play the E version because you do! Kind of like edited versions of CDs & Movies.#

A nice interview with Brent Simmons, the co-creator of NetNewsWire. I'm a big fan of it, I use it, I'd probably pay for it if I could use PayPal or something but I can't. Brent makes an interesting comment that your body is your world presence and your blog is your web presence. I feel like my blog doesn't really say much about ME besides what I find interesting on the internet. But then again, maybe that's because I don't like me and thus why would I write about me?#

The Semantics of War is very funny :)#

wow, zimbabwe strongman compares himself to hitler.#

an interesting read about email and productivity.#

nightly builds and leaked betas are stupid#

#

Joel has an interesting article that critiques venture capitalists. It's a very nice read and it echos my thoughts in my head about VC. One thing I wonder though, is how often to VC'd companies actually do anything good? Are there numbers for this sort of thing?#

Martin Fowler meditates on the inability to measure team productivity and how this makes it difficult to justify and compare tools and methodologies.#

An article on Kuro5hin about China, supposedly "surpassing" the USA. Read the comments for the good stuff. It links an article about the current "ruler" of China and how not many actually know who he is.#

Dan squawks about Multimethod dispatch. And it is good.#

Dave Hyatt critiques his brother critique of Mozilla.#

An article is on KernelTrap with Nick Piggin, the guy behind the Anticipatory Scheduler, which seems like a pretty neat idea that is only really needed because applications don't ask for enough of what they need at once.#

An RPGamer editorial on Heroic Archetypes in RPGs. I think it's great the RPGs are so popular that people write this sort of thing, brings a tear to my eye.#

Chris Brumme, of the Common Language Runtime, discusses the memory model of CLR, where it went wrong, and how it can be fixed. There is an interesting problem that has to be solved in all languages so it's useful to see how it's done in one particular implementation with a lot of clout.#

Game Girl Advance has a little tidbit about "The Unprogrammed Enemy" of MMORPGs: Other players and Bugs of the game.#

Tim Bray on the "Death" of Home Pages. I certainly don't use a home page anymore and I don't really read anything that doesn't offer an RSS feed, it's just not convenient to constant check websites throughout the day.#

And then later Tim Bray wrote about the real business of publishing magazines and how that model is necessary in some sense but is at the risk of being toppled by "insider" bloggers providing all the worthwhile news.#

Pragmatic Dave describes Bloom filters, which sound like a "vector search engine" sort of scenario, except at a more restrained and specific levels. Weee!#

"Four Things that could have improved "The Matrix: Reloaded" ", I'll give away the last one: "A time machine so you can go back in time and warn yourself not to see The Matrix: Reloaded.", Hah!#

troutgirl is a good read, twice
a curious read
total recall and sixth day found to be the same movie
thoughts about iraqi tactics here!

this was funny; i really loved river city ransom :(
attend a protest, and goto jail
"i was a naive fool to be a human shield for saddam"... read it
read about the ladder theory.
an interesting read
read this today: "All weekend, as CNN reporters respectfully pointed their microphones at US Army PR men, al-Jazeera was showing a very different image: the body of a child with the back of its head blown off, absent brain."
check this out: "We are grieving for our dead today; the giddy first few days of nearly bloodless (for coalition forces) battle are at an end. To some extent, this is one of the costs of fighting war by moral means. In Gulf War I, we used armored bulldozers to bury alive vast numbers of Iraqi soldiers, rather than risk American lives cleaning out these trenches. This time, we are killing Iraqis only when they clearly refuse to surrender. This is morally superior, and will pay a dividend, a year or two hence, in respect and gratitude from those soldiers, and their families, who survive the war. But right now, we are paying for this."

A Late Night Post at Random Fixation is really weird. I had a strange dream last night where someone in the dream remarked to me that it was odd my alarm hadn't gone off as well. Very strange...#

Joss Whedon on why certain things were done the way they were in the Buffy finale.#

Justin and Jane sound like they have a cute relationship.#

Don Park writes about talking to himself in the bathroom. Weirdo!#

Tim Bray on the Death of Scholarship in schools today. Google is the future, Google is the internet. Bow. He also provides more discussion of the RDF issue, in which he cites the Russell Beattie.#

An introduction to "Otherkin" at kuro5hin. I'm don't like people who are different, so obviously I think this "Otherkin" are craaazy.#

Also at kuro5hin, a Layman's Guide to the Banach-Tarski Paradox. Weird Science.#

A very funny look at the office habits of North American Professors. It's sad because I see professors who play these tricks :(#

James Dyson makes water go up hill.#

An interview of john gruber at waferbaby goes over how there really is no "cult of apple". Interesting read.#

Vijay Singh's sex tips for girls around prom season. I wish that my date to the prom had read this before we went. Hah! Pictures from a prom last night.#

Some intense philosophizing about the Matrix Reloaded.#

Six Bronze Age people were found murdered around Stonehenge.#

this was an interesting read#

getting hurt? in war? nooooooooo#

the best part of this article is the guy's ridiculous facial hair :)#

the UKUSA evicted an island? score 1 for MY team!#

the grand list of console role playing game cliches:
"39. George W. Bush Geography Simplification Initiative
Every country in the world will have exactly one town in it, except for the country you start out in, which will have three."
"71. If You Meet The Buddha In A Random Encounter, Kill Him!
When you're out wandering around the world, you must kill everything you meet. People, animals, plants, insects, fire hydrants, small cottages, anything and everything is just plain out to get you. It may be because of your rampant kleptomania."
"85. Figurehead Rule
Whenever someone asks you a question to decide what to do, it's just to be polite. He or she will ask the question again and again until you answer "correctly.""#

joel very interesting#

from critical section: "You know how people are asking "Where is Saddam?"  Well, I have a question.  "Where is Osama?"  If he were around, you'd think he would publish one of his little videos condemning U.S. aggression and calling on Islam to defeat the infidels.  Maybe Osama and Saddam are together?"#

from command post:oped: "Are we in the West upset because they show dead people or just when they are showing OUR dead people? In a world where Western audiences can see all manner of death on their TV and movie screen why are we so upset about video of an actual execution? Are we the hypocrites or is Al Jazeera just uncivilised?" - this makes me think of how happy americans get when they watch murders on death row. sick.#

#

Something really funny over at Random Fixation. If I were a jerk and I needed to break up with a girl then this would be THE way to do it.#

A nice little spoof of an original lesson on being an Alpha Male.#

Russell Beattie talks about what we all know: that Java and XML are just roadblocks on the path to creating useful applications. "Learning curves like upside hockey sticks."#

Tony Piece, the great guy he is, writes about an awesome party he had and how you too can know if your party is bad ass or not. Something definitely worth checking out if you plan on having a party any time soon, or at least if you want to leave vicariously through Tony, I know I do. Because HE hangs out with Moxie. *swooon*#

tony pierce on why the la bus system is so great. the only bussing i've done a lot is in montreal and when i was in middle school i had to ride the nashua city bus to my work because i didn't feel like walking for 2 hours, although around that same time i used to walk about an hour to the mall - why i don't know, i just sat around and read magazines, i could've done it at home.#

tony pierce acknowledges that no one has any class anymore, because they cheat at online yahoo fantasy baseball. all i can say is winning is winning and some people want to be the "best" just so someone else isn't.#

after reading some reflection on change and going with flow i can't help but think about myself in that regard. while some many hold the torch for their exes for a long time, i think i'm almost opposite to that... in some sense. i never really give the girls i'm with a chance, as in, i don't think i ever really care about them nearly as much as they care about me, because if i start to care than i might get hurt. it's not fair i know, but i don't want to get hurt again... oh my poor emo heart blah blah blah.#

tony pierce notices the strangest things, like the fact the women who drive subway trains aren't as informed or courteous as the men. women can't do anything right huh?#

aaron swartz points out that the ability of schools to make kids take out piercings is very weak. i wonder if this sort of argument applies to tatoos and coloured/styled hair, because the private school my best friend went to is anal about the stuff. side story, they wouldn't let my friend "spike" up his hair when he went there so he decided to never wash it so it was so greasy and dirty that it would stand up on it's own. what a rebel.#

retro native forth looks pretty cute and realistic coming from TUNES related developers. i'm on there mailing list (tunes') most of the time they argue about people posting on the list who aren't smart enough to think about their buzzwords, but sometimes there's interesting conversation.#

werner vogel's links a bad ass paper from SIGMETRICS 2003 that figures out how to optimize an architecture "that needs to track statistics for a 10 GBps linecard with 1 million active counters and 10 counter updates\240 per packet.", scarrrry.#

peter lindberg is totally right, "Sometimes, posting crap is what enables you to, occasionally, post gold." - it's like the old "if you want to be a writer, always write" - eventually you MUST get good if you do it enough, right?
he also links a really interesting article, about pixar's offices. the whole idea of the "bathroom effect" is out of there cool.#

a girl and i were talking about when we should hang out this weekend, she said either saturday night or some time sunday. she asked me which was better, i said both because i think she's cool. girls are pretty.#

an article on kuro5hin about how to get lucky, i mean how to be success, read it.#

i would be PETRIFIED to fly a helicopter like philip greenspun, as in i would probably shit my pants. i'm such a wuss. when i was first of age to drive a motorcycle my dad got my brother and i one but i was too afraid to drive it so i just walked to work and school instead. the old "i'd rather than get there slow then not get there at all"#

philip greenspun has some great thoughts that question whether or not saddam's regime was necessary to keep iraq under control, i wonder...?#

Paul Graham introduced the topic of Extreme Programming and 'Agile Software' Methodologies to the ll1-discuss list and some great discussion was had. There were also a great number of links, including this one:#

A discussion that dissects and attempts to destroy XP.

Over at LWN.net a new weekly edition is up, and that means that last week's is now free. Since I'm a free loading collectivist open-source pig I don't actually support people who support open source efforts but I do use the things they provide. I also link those things to others:#

The new weekly edition, I generally only read the Kernel and Development sections because they seem like the only ones with worth while information. Occasionally the front page stories are interesting but not very often. This week, however, I'm not very impressed with the whole thing.

Russell Beattie comments a bit on how there's this great taboo over talking about how much you make in general and especially in relation to other people you work with. He got on this subject by linking someone else who writes about the great masses of money that corporate executives make and the many different ways they extract that money from company coffers. I make pretty bad money for what I do, but good for my age. I am pretty confident that I don't make what I deserve because the money doesn't exist for that at my company. Why do I think this? Well, the owner of the company (my "boss") made 4 thousand dollars last YEAR. He takes the hit when the company doesn't do well, not the employees. It's cool.#

Yesterday, Russell Beattie gave a long list of CSS related links that are good exploring for anymore interested in such things. The reason for Russell posting these links is that he has found a new interest in CSS. I think CSS is cool but I don't use it where I should - although I'd like to.#

Also slightly about CSS, from a few days ago, dive.into.mark: "I will not be arguing the merits of web standards, CSS , accessibility, and open source. It is quite obvious to me that these are the future of the Internet and of the computing industry in general, and if you >t see that by now, I >t help you. Adapt or get left behind.": Hah!#

candon

Tony Pierce, he's really cool.#

one. Some Lakers shit, and then a nice little bit about what men want and that college girls should be sweet to college boys.

two. Everywhere in America is the same whether you choose to believe it or not. Everyone is cheap, lies to themselves and others, and is an asshole.

three. Sport jokes I don't understand.

Philip Greenspun writes about why the United States no longer seemed to be producing many engineering and science breakthroughs and students. He hypothesizes that it is because we focus on our enemies to see what we must do better and that because now our "enemies" are poor Muslim countries it is felt we don't need those sorts of things any longer.#

Cory Doctorow links a Salon review of the new Matrix movie that interprets a particular scene COMPLETELY differently than I interpreted it. When I saw it it felt like an excuse to show hot bodies and Morpheus' speech seemed really tacky.#

Aaron Swartz also writes a blurb about how he was not very impressed with the Matrix: Reloaded. He (cleverly) titles his entry, "Matrix Unloaded". I think that this Matrix is great and that the action and gimmicks really take a secondary seat to the story it is telling. One thing that I think supports this is that it really doesn't show the "Real People" doing the trivial stuff that they have to do - ie, going to exits and plugging in - because we already know that it happens so it's no longer important to the story to constantly emphasis that they are leaving/entering the Matrix. Meh?#

Now about me, I really dislike writing about myself because I don't want people I know to stumble upon this site and learn what I really think of them and myself. I have to keep up the facade that I am sure of myself and that I think everyone is swell. I don't think I'm very different from other people in this regard. I'm very selfish, I want to know the truth but I don't want to be an active participant in making sure the truth is known for others. What can you do?#

Also, today the power for my web server went as well as for all the other computers in the same room. Now does the admin turn my box on too? Nope! I have to figure out what happened and turn it on myself... grrrr!#

Halley (not Hayley) explains what her "Alpha Male" articles are all about and what brought them on now. I will recommend to her (and YOU, reader, if you are interested) to read "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male", because it's great about the corrosion of male power and self esteem. Basically, it's thesis is that males have the same problems that feminism sought to solve, except there's no movement for men so they are lost and feel betrayed and "stiffed."#

Gary Hart compares the "New" United States of America to Rome, and says that currently we are in the transition from Republic to Empire and like Rome it will lead to our demise. I find this mode of thinking very logical and I like how Gary doesn't try to condemn or put down those who are responsible for such a transition - the idea of just pointing out what's going on is favorable to me versus attacking someone. Make sure you read the comments because they add twice the flavor of the original piece.#

I've just found Gary Hart's blog and this guy seems real cool, you should read all his older entries because he's got his head in the right place.#

A good little review of the Matrix Reloaded on Hunting the Muse. I definitely agree that the second movie offers more difficult questions to answer, and whose answers will be more interesting. A different review of the Matrix on Kuro5hin that basically says it sucks and containers some spoilers.#

Moxie writes about a guy who didn't "grope or grab" her in the two months they dated. Wow, although I think that if I were to go on a date with Moxie I would be too petrified to even go near her, and "groping" would be OUT of the question.#

An article in The Atlantic linked by a comment of Moxie's above post is a slightly (just slightly) biased explanation of the differences between introverts and extroverts, and how you can "Care for Your Introvert." Pretty interesting, although I don't think everyone fits in either box. For example, I feel like I'm a pretty good people person but I don't always need to be around people to feel "energized" and good. Another question this makes me think of is: Are there introvert and extrovert bloggers? Maybe extrovert bloggers would be bloggers whom are always commenting on other's blogs and replying to them in their own blogs, but introvert bloggers would be those who mostly write about extra-blog things (such as politics, technology, etc) rather than Blogosphere related things. Thoughts?#

Tony Pierce gives more advice on being a good writer. Sometimes I ponder if I would want to be a writer. I don't really have anything to say that I feel hasn't been said before and I don't feel like I have any stories to tell. I've been taught that it's impolite to talk about yourself incessantly, so why would I tell my stories? Maybe I need to punch the people who told me these things in the face and tell my "stories"? Tony also notes that Moxie was going to pick him up. I pine.#

Earlier this weekend Tony public replied to his critics. He's sooo my hero. Although I'm obviously not as cool because I do grammar and spell.#

I'm adding some books to my books list because Ted Leung makes them look good. Network science hmm? I don't know enough about it but I surely can! Another Ted Leung entry links an article he found via another blog and coverage of programming language panel.#

Philip Greenspun learns that his 2nd cousin has a blog from an article in the New York Times. Welcome to the new world.#

Joel Spolsky talks about his distaste for software prototypes. I would have to agree, build the first version (call it a prototype if you want) and then refactor/evolve it into the real product. I can see, however, how a big place like Microsoft would let that fly but in normal chimps with limited budgets and sensibility not making prototype that are completely thrown away seems like the best choice. Later, Critical Section disagrees with Joel.#

That Critical Section entry also links a neat article entitled "Why Try to Out-Google Google?" The idea is that you can't displace the market leader by doing better than them at their own game, you must do something completely different. Don't attack their front, attack from the sides and back. The article also talks about exactly why Google is/was successful - And It Ain't Algorithms.#

Practices that are tried and true,
Have come to corrupt through and through,

#

All trying to destroy the myth,
Blogs are tools to stroke egos with,

#

The future languages today,
are not as they were yesterday,

#

Today the pink beauty is known,
its grace never before shown,

#

College students seem care-free,
Sadly, aged they will be hair-free,

#

Technology aims to free us,
From what it means to be us,

#

The whisper of notes escapes,
Maybe to return is their fates?

#

Searching all the space for a sun,
Leads my quest towards a new Watson,

#

It seems one may think they agree,
the other throws the first out to see,

#

Refactoring and Lisp frees some girth,
It shows how much the code is worth,

#

a simple article on continuations that helped me make sure that what i thought were continuations really were.
slow day.

There is no such thing,
as a mythical month/man,
too many brings nothing,

#

But a single in Perl can,
And as opponents might say,
Not ones with a tan,

#

(Defense of this prey),
Similiar attacks exist,
On gays in LA,

#

Sometimes, hard to resist,
Conditioned humility,
With enemies a'midst,

#

The ability,
To summarize this offends,
sensibility,

#

Be weary of friends,
Who's objective is not safe,
And won't make ammends,

#

When buildings they strafe,
Don't survive the disruption,
Of their violent chafe,

#

Monkey corruption,
Of an examination,
A chance eruption,

#

My admiration,
For the skilled writers is this,
Mere compilation

read some nice stuff linked by fare:
CLiki:Lisp - Next Generation an interesting beginning to a discussion on how common lisp could be improved. it seems to me the goal of such a movement should be: get rid of the cruft, standardize a way to make libraries, start a bunch of separate standards to implement new features: concurrency, clos, etc. so you don't destroy the core and so you use lisp for what it's good for: extending itself.
on that note, there is a form of lisp about all about parrallelism (concurrency) linked by the above page called qlisp, but its designer thought of something better... and it's pretty dense but it's an interesting way to tackle parrallelism
another interesting post on the tunes list linked by the above cliki discussion all about a future common lisp. if only it were real :) one gross thing about it is how it seems to push java a lot. interoperability is great, but not just to one language/other environment.

so america is upset about soldiers on tv huh? (link): ``Suddenly, the government of the United States has discovered the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world, but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, immediately complained that "it is against the Geneva Convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them."1'' - does the US support the Geneva Convention (and ICC) or does it not?
iraq: it's going to get worse before it gets better (link): "Early indications are worrying. Guerrilla tactics are to be expected and are obviously Saddam's best card. But they've started much further south and with much greater intensity than UKUSA intelligence estimated. The smart money was on the South rising up as one to greet the liberators with open arms. It hasn't happened. Instead we've seen the first signs of the Fedayeen in action against the UKUSA forces. This could indicate the beginning of a prolonged urban struggle which though not as costly as Vietnam in terms of human lives, could tie up large numbers of UKUSA military not for months but decades. Vietnam it will not be. Chechnya - it might."
it turns out there were no chemical weapons at a plant in iraq that was thought to contain them. oops, sorry we killed you for nothing, my bad! (link)
blair refuses to guarantee that cluster bombs won't be used in this war (link)
and here's why (hours later)...
clusters bombs being in this war too, after "More than 4,000 civilians have been killed or injured by cluster munition duds since the end of the [last] war." (link)

A writing about beginner's mind,
Without knowing it's of that kind,

#

Dan writes about CPS, why it's so good,
To have under Parrot's hood,

#

Yet another day with nothing say,
Maybe tomorrow it will be okay,

#

there's a new kernel traffic out and it has this great quote from linus torvalds, "If you want "aesthetics", go play with microkernels, or other academic projects. They don't care about their users, they care about their ideas. The end result is, in my opinion, CRAP."#

some fanboy at rpgamer does too much drugs when he plays final fantasy vii.#

julius caesar has decided to make a book of his reports from the war he ran.#

there's an awesome flamewar on 9fans because of the new license. check it out for oss drama.#

so... ugh, moxie, met some random person who knew some other random person in los angeles whom she had interviewed. there world is pretty small it seems. i once went on a date with this girl to a dance, and she turned out to be lame so i found this other girl there. after another date we realized that she was the cousin of my best friend since elementary school. and actually, i saw her the other day visiting him. moxie also linked me. it's really weird because she's like my role model, well maybe not my role model, but basically - if i were to meet a girl my age who was exactly like moxie i would hold on to her for the rest of my life because i'd know she'd be awesome when we got older.#

tony pierce made a photo essay about mr jeff's birth day party and the colours make my face hurt. after giving advice to all the to-be-stars out there, that sex gets your foot in the door but you need bit more, he gives positive words about the donnas and that they are "hot in many ways". here is where tony and i diverge, the closest they came to being hot was by being in Drive Me Crazy across from clarissa.#

critique of tony pierce's art: i'm american so i have no taste in art so i think it looks like something someone would paint if they were trying to make people "think" that were obscure, profound artists but actually weren't. it looks like at the beginning there was order and then it was destroyed in a systematic fashion, although that almost makes it seem more like art that tells a story and less art that tries to impress. my best art was made in paint though, so what i do i know?#

if only i were as funny and mean as tony pierce talking about anna k, who by the way has a weird face. it kind of reminds me of... it's like a swarm of wild gazelles gathering on the horizon.#

so apparently, the only things worth linking today linked my in the last week, this makes me feel really lame and i question this post but there wasn't really anything else good in my rss aggregator and then my mail box was full of random stuff like the new perl6 summary, which isn't archived yet so there's no link.#

i've been listening to all time quarterback and dean martin all day.#

paul graham is on a roll today: "A lot of startups are doing de facto product development for big companies. Because in the startup phase they don't yet have the big companies' pointy-haired bosses telling them what to do, they can
use radically better technologies than they'd be allowed to if they already worked for the company that will later buy them." it's clever to think of startups as the r&d of bigger companies that they don't know they've funded yet.
i noticed that both lambda the ultimate and lemonodor mentioned the same stuff i did from ll1-discuss :)
pretty good response to some criticism over at green hat journal. i like this guy and i like that he mentions a tic-tac-toe opponent, the second program i'd ever written that i was proud of (the first being a simple database for my movie collection; both in pascal when i was young and stupid)

updated kernel status... i think linux is OK
one of many to see the bulletproof monk trailer - i will see basically any movie and find SOMETHING good about it, so i'll like this even if it does "rip off" the matrix
today's dictionary.com word of the day was "spoony", oh final fantasy 2/4, edward the "spoony bard"
i finished reading lullaby by chuck p today. it was very exciting, i'm a big fan of chuck... so weird and clever. very enjoyable :)

Jeremy Zawodny's idea about tracking weblog burnout rate is very funny. I think in addition to figuring out how often it happens, it would be interesting to find out why it happens. Do people stop because they don't get popular fast enough? Or because they run out of things to write about? Now I'm curious!#

Russell Beattie talks about his interview with Wired, and how media is changing because people will read the interview then goto his site and see what he REALLY said. Media will definitely change once we have tablets that read RSS feeds and present them like a newspaper... hah, that'll be the day.#

Tony Pierce satires this great nation with faked out patriotism.#

Peter Lindberg talks about how Hungarian notation is bad solution to a problem that is worth solving. That problem being, "How to make code easier understandable" or Code Clarity. The whole of expressive and high level languages is to make the purpose of code more clear. So rather than strap ugly names and conventions onto old low level languages - why not make a higher level language whether you don't need such strap on ugliness?#

Tim O'Reilly responds to an email about his last blog about scripting languages. I think that recognizing that all apps "harden" eventually is an important step to realizing that you must set yourself up to be constantly "stirring" the pot so that it takes a much longer amount of time.#

Some interesting on asterisk* about the issues he must deal with when working with an external design firm that was hired to help with what he was hired for. Good read, can't say I can relate much though.#

Some great discussion of ll1-discuss today ranging from such great topics as extreme programming, old vs "new" programmers, test driven development, and Guy Steele revealing that RMS is a real person who's done something worthwhile. #

the article on the "microsoft caste system" was very interesting.
my favourite part from the hundred year language: "Presumably many libraries will be for domains that don't even exist yet. If SETI@home works, for example, we'll need libraries for communicating with aliens. Unless of course they are sufficiently advanced that they already communicate in XML."
a review wofram's book from green hat
what an AWESOME, commercial
nice little article about dvorak's apple wrangling

the latest surfin' safari entry is WICKED, funny. i don't use safari though, it can't autocheck my bookmarks like omniweb... if only... :( also it doesn't show anywhere where a link is going to bring you before you click it, that's very handy
nothing else really meaningful today in internet land
**updated** so apparently safari can have that cute little status bar, which is nice. i now search for possibly an external utility that will check my bookmarks for updates; i understand that at the moment safari is focusing on stability and compatibility but hopefully it'll have a few more features before it's general release

i just read something on Synaesthesia from kuro5hin, it was pretty interesting. there are so many different types of science that are incredible and interesting.
it's strange to read stuff like this as a vegan because foods that are traditionally meant to "tempt" others are seen as disgusting and immoral by myself. curious.
i read the perl.com article on search engines and i thought about a patent i once read from the nsa... i ponder about creating a vector search engine based not on word occurences but n-gram occurances, maybe more general? i don't know much about search technology but it would be an interesting experiment
read this article about self assessment makes me think i should start being more self deprecating so that people will see me as more intelligent or something :)
more about search engines: i read "Patterns in Unstructured Data" and found it pretty satisfying. the search results they get seem like it works very well. the only thing i am curious about is: if they have an algorithm that gives reoccuring words low "weights", why do they need to have a "stop word list" to strip out words such as "a", "be", etc - wouldn't those words 'naturally' get low weights and not effect the search outcome?
there is discussion on ll1-discuss about whether or not files and i/o should be part of a language or a library. it feels pretty obvious to me that it should be a library because you never know what new technologies will appear that may not follow file-i/o rules. and it's is a rather obtuse abstraction for storable objects. the idea of orthogonal persistence is very appealling to me.

latest perl6 summary was sent out today, woo hoo. my favourite posts where dan's post on objects; parrot is cool and perl6 i dream of.
very nice letter, it's sad that the political enviornment is causing such great people to leave their posts rather than stay on and turn it around.
read something linked from here, a buffy thing - i used to watch buffy all the time but I ran out of time, i can still enjoy this cause i remember some of them.
funny little joel article came in the mail today, but i linked the online-safe version.

article on the justice system: "America now has in excess of two million of its own citizens in jail, from a population of 286 million (0.7 %). For comparison China ,which most would consider to be an authoritarian police state, has a prison population of 1.4 million from a population of about 1.3 billion (0.1%). This is the largest proportion of any country in the world."

nice little blurb and comments here
new kernel traffic
appalling
george bush preselects reporters to allow to ask questions at conferences, maybe this is why key issues aren't talked about?
woooooo!

nice post on ll1-discuss from David Farber talking about a better business model than aiming to sell out. the ll1-discuss archives are very strange so i can really link to it right now (it hasn't appeared on the archive yet) but it's meant to address the yahoo store issue.
nice wholesome stupid humour
a cool little use of an openbsd feature. tying this to an ids and other logs of that sort would be keen.
a nice little talk from chromatic

nice little article on xml
read these.
one: "And let's face it, Mr Bush's carefully thought-out policy towards Iraq is the only way to bring about international peace and security. The one certain way to stop Muslim fundamentalist suicide bombers targeting the US or the UK is to bomb a few Muslim countries that have never threatened us."
two: "To prevent terrorism by dropping bombs on Iraq is such an obvious idea that I can't think why no one has thought of it before. It's so simple. If only the UK had done something similar in Northern Ireland, we wouldn't be in the mess we are in today."
three: "I would like to say a special word about another side of Tony Blair's courage - his moral courage. Tony Blair has the guts to stand on platform after platform repeating the words of the President of the United States even though he must be well aware that in so doing he makes himself a laughing stock to the rest of the world. Tony Blair has the balls not to be influenced by the knowledge that people imagine he is the US President's parrot and that his knee jerks only when George W. pulls the strings. It must take a very special kind of stamina to withstand that sort of daily humiliation. It is time we gave Mr Blair credit for it."

the ObjCBrowser via micheal mccracken looks pretty cool, if you're in a refactoring mode or a fan of smalltalk.#

from moxie, i read chrystal's blog. and it's pretty fun. i think i will start building compendium of girl's wish lists so i can better understand the wish i cannot hope to answer, but may have success in trying to approximate.#

tony pierce has sexy fantasies about other xbi agents who tortured him with tantalizing terpsichore after tumultuous adventures of the crime fighting flavor.
(using words you don't normally use in writing is artistic, trust me)#

there's a very interesting article on kuro5hing, that is essentially a review and contra