tags: personal journal

I just read a great interview with a moderator of encyclopediadramatica.com. It's clear that the interviewer was expecting the moderator to be a young stoner with anarchist leanings, but this expectation turned out to be hilariously wrong as the guy is a middle-aged professional and father. Ninemsn applied the standard you've-been-a-naughty-boy, what-have-you-to-say-for-yourself line of questioning anyway.

Choice quotes from the article:

Do you think it's possible for people to go too far with free speech? Is there a line that can be crossed?

Let us talk epistemology for a moment. The minute there is a hidden limit on speech, it is no longer free. Free speech with limits is not free speech under any circumstances. But Matthew 15:11 (what goes into a man's mouth does not make him "unclean", but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him "unclean") certainly applies to some users of ED and virtually any other web community in existence.

Later:

Allowing such material to be published doesn't seem to me like something most Christians would be comfortable with. How do you justify this to yourself?

All the things Christ said and did would make most "Christians" uncomfortable. He called the leaders of a specific ethnic group murderers and liars (John 8:44), demanded hatred (Luke 14:26) and flogged bankers and flipped over their tables. John 8 is an extremely condemning document — at the time it would have been considered worse than anything on ED. Many people were brutally murdered by the Pharisitic establishment over it. The synoptic gospels and the gospel according to John were so revolutionary that no publishing platform would take them.

These days most Christians focus on Paul and completely ignore the life and actions of Christ. If Christ were here again today he'd probably start a website and people would be crying for its censorship.

Interview with ED moderator.

Update: I'm late with this. Here's the relevant reddit thread which includes a couple of level-headed comments from the interviewer.

When I finish my thesis I'd really like to investigate some nature-of-consciousness type stuff, because the way the brain works is really interesting to me.

Here's a motivating example from my own brain. I've been in serious thesis-write-up mode for quite some time now. Often, I have problems structuring my writing. A good structure can really improve the readability of a piece of writing, so this is a big problem.

I deal with this big problem the way I deal with all big problems, which is, er, to procrastinate. But after procrastinating, I think about all the stuff I want to express, and start writing bits of it down*.

That (i.e. undirected writing) never works, so then I pace around a bit... okay, to get to the point, what actually happens is that after about 7 hours of this, the way to structure the chapter I'm working on just arrives in my head, apparently ex nihilo, and it all makes sense, and that ends up being the structure I use.

It seems like my consciousness isn't very involved in the creative process at all, but is instead content to just sit back and have fun. Kind of like the tourist sitting in a boat watching Disney's "It's a small world after all", who doesn't know about -- or care about -- the phenomenal amount of work that went into building the attraction**. So, to whatever part of my brain is doing the actual work -- hi, could you possibly hurry the fuck up? I'm keen to move on.

*There is a theory that doing a bit of work and then procrastinating for a while is more productive than trying to maintain focus for hours and hours. For obvious reasons, I find this theory to be very seductive.

**The subconscious mind: 289 animatronic dolls singing to a dark tunnel.

A.K.A. I Think All The Product Placement In Lady GaGa's New Music Video Is An Ironic Joke But Everyone Seems To Be Taking It Seriously

Who wants a Coke?

I like Lady GaGa, but her (not work-safe) video / mini-movie, Telephone, is confusingly full of ads. It features a shot of GaGa's crotch next to a prominent Virgin Mobile advertisement, and also Diet Coke hair accessories, Wendy's fast food wrappers, a Polaroid camera, Wonder Bread, and a couple of other products.

Each of these placements get the classic close-up-on-the-product-name that has kind of been a staple of product placement parody since it began. So by now presumably everyone is immune to this sort of stuff and its inclusion in a music video is a satirical take on the whole thing, right? Well, Welt Branding doesn't seem to think so. Nor does The Guardian, or a host of random bloggers. So I'm confused. Surely people don't actually take this stuff seriously?

The video is also 95% naked women but I'll leave that issue for some other blogger.

So what is this, ironic, post-ironic, or post-post-ironic? Thing is, it probably doesn't matter if it's ironic or not, since it will work anyway.

Also, what's with the Swedish lyrics ticker at the end?

Care for a crotchphone?

... or prison dating?

... or some delicious Wonder Bread?

... but I'm at a party. And I'm damn tired of my phone ringing. Sometimes it feels like I live in Central Station. At night...

This is Gordon Guthrie on attracting customers to his start-up:

it's also like teenage romance, because things seem to go well, we're getting on, you casually say "would you like to buy the software?" and they sort of coyly go "Ooh! Looks very interesting, but I'll need to speak to my friends and we'll see what's happening," and then you go home and sit by the phone, and you're waiting for this: "Please, please, phone up and tell me. Phone up and say you want to buy, you want to buy!"

-- Gordon Guthrie on the BBC World Service

Surprisingly lucid description for a software developer, I thought. ;-)

So I went and checked out his site. My first impression is that they really need to do a better job of conveying what the thing does. The front page says "build your own Web apps, without programming", but that's way too vague. What kind of Web app can I build? Facebook? It turns out that Hypernumbers is two things: a Web-based spreadsheet, and a way to build a Web-based interface to that spreadsheet. You can produce views which come from data in your spreadsheet, and you can also produce Web pages containing HTML forms which let users modify or add to your spreadsheet.

For example, their sample app is a small Web-based poll which lets you choose a favourite band from a drop-down list, but also lets you select options using radio buttons, or using free-form entry. Submitting the form adds the entries to the spreadsheet. Everything about the Web page and the spreadsheet can be customised (for example, the introductory text on the page is a reference to a cell in the spreadsheet containing text). My only beef with it is a counter they added indicating the number of respondents who have "bad taste in music": this is simply a count of the number of people who selected "Queen"! A particularly egregious error given one of the other options is Bananarama.

All in all it seems like quite cool tech, but it doesn't have a real-world use case. Or rather, it has too many: nothing for people to latch on to and say "this is for me!" Also, although the spreadsheet is very nicely done, the demo site is decidedly spartan to the point of looking a little out of date. I realise they want to keep things simple, but some reasonable CSS styling wouldn't hurt that goal at all.

To be honest, my favourite part of the site is nothing to do with the tech itself: it's the way it automatically picks a password for you, by combining two words and appending some numbers. It's more than secure enough (particularly if you do some kind of tarpitting after multiple log-in attempts), but also much easier to remember than the standard 8-random-letters-and-numbers copout. I wish more sites did it!

By the way, if you don't like targeted advertising, as I don't, you can visit Google's ad preferences site and opt out. But it's probably better to give bogus interests than to opt out, because it reveals less information. For example, I selected things I wasn't remotely interested in ("Football", "Nails Screws & Fasteners", "Payroll Services"). The less attractive "targeted" ads are to me, the better.

(Not opting out means that Google will still build a profile of your interests over time, so you may need to repeat this process. But I don't think it's any good at doing that, particularly if you poison the well as above, so I shouldn't worry.)

Facebook: Facemash "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person".

YouTube: the founders of YouTube stated that they originally set out to make a version of Hot or Not with Video before developing their more inclusive site.

(quotes from Wikipedia)

Bears: Godless killing machines. (Stephen Colbert)
Spiders: Godless spinning machines. (Diogenes, fark.com)
Atheists: Godless sinning machines. (MandyJoBo, tressugar.com)
Americans: Godless sex machines. (billi789, mediamatters.org)
The Universe: Godless vending machine. (aish.com)

Special thanks: Google. Not yet in the Snowclones Database.

This page now includes everything in my tumble log, flonk.lardcave.net. If you read Flonk and not this site, don't worry: it's still there, I'm just stealing its content. But if you read Flonk and not this site, what are you doing here?

LADY MACBETH NICHOLAS

Out, damned spot mucus! out, I say!--One: two: why,
then, 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?--Yet who would have thought the old man Nicholas
to have so much blood mucus in him.

It's important to preserve the dignity of the original. For example, I could have written "out, damned snot", but that's a bit gauche, don't you think?

It's trendy to have a low opinion of Valentine's Day, so excuse the hipsterism of this post, but it truly is the worst holiday. Catie and I want to show that we care on non-State-mandated days. So on the day itself, to acknowledge the pure unadulterated commercialism of the thing, we both go to the most depressing food outlet we know (McDonald's), order something small, and people-watch. We do this even when we're in separate cities, communicate by phone or whatever, and gossip. This is kind of funny, but also (to be honest) symptomatic of my early-to-mid-20s tendency to rationalise the life out of everything. We still do it, but, nowadays, just as something to do.

Anyway, Catie, who is much nicer than I am, apparently blatantly ignored years of tradition and sent me these.

I just ate one. It was delicious.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Hi girls and boys! It's time for "Lessons from the masters: The Elements Of Style, by Strunk and White"!

Today we're going to make a recipe inspired by their famous dictum omit needless words.

Banana Bread

You will need:

• 1 cup self-raising flour
• 1/2 cup water

To make:

1. Combine all ingredients.
2. Bake.
3. Think about bananas as you chew.

Variations: Use more flour for tougher, chewier bread. Use more water for a more banana-esque texture.

Use more flour and more water for more banana bread.

Edit: This recipe's essence is immortalised in one of Masaoka Shiki's, uh, lesser-known works:
I bite into the banana bread
And jeering resounds
From Language Log HQ.

Tedious caller: Hello Joel and Jeff. My name is Jeffrey Wiens, and I have been a developer for around four years. I'm currently in an applied mathematics graduate program because I needed something more challenging than what my previous jobs could offer. How would you deal with programmers like me, that are intellectually bored at work?

Joel Spolsky: There are no bored people, there are only BORING people. If you're bored at work it's because you're a boring person.

-- Stack Overflow podcast #82

I hate shaving. Facial hair is a nuisance. If there was some way to just remove all the hair from my face, forever, I would take it. I have considered depilatory cream, but apparently this stuff has marginal effect even for dainty little feminine hairs, and is completely useless on thick, burly, testosterone-infused whiskers. I have considered electrolysis. This looks promising and (since I am not actually considering becoming a woman) has an appealing "crazy person" edge.

My distaste for my own beard, combined with other chaotic-neutral-tending* personality traits that I may trouble you with in a different post, requires me to spend as little time as possible on daily hair-related maintenance. Consequently I bought an electric shaver. This one. It's pretty great, and I would recommend it. It's cheap, and you can wash it. Whenever I drag it over my face, it removes about 10% of the hair. So, with consecutive passes, I creep ever closer to having a completely hairless chin -- that mythical, Platonic asymptote.** I don't mind. This is also what happens when I shave using a blade, except that when using a blade I also tend cut my face up.

But eventually the foil started to break a bit, and it didn't seem to be doing the usual stellar job of removing a small amount of hair, so I started looking around for replacements. Shavers are based on a traditional vibrating-motor-attached-to-knives technology which has been with us for centuries, and can now be produced quite economically. There isn't that much in them to justify, say, a $400 price tag, confidence-inspiring reviews to the contrary ("This is not for the tutti fruit, lolli pop beard. Boys get out of the way, you might get hurt.") I ended up buying a Wahl 4000 "Custom shave system". It had some good reviews (though, notably, not on Amazon), it seemed reasonably-priced. But it is terrible.

Firstly, it sounds like a train. It's not washable, and the plastic is flimsy. But the strangest and most troubling part is the number of accessories it comes with. It has a plug-in charger (fine), and a charging dock which fell apart when I plugged it in (not so good). It has a flimsy plastic cover for the foil part. It has three interchangeable foils, which look different but are functionally identical. It has a vinyl case, and a little brush. Most oddly, it comes with a separate battery-powered "personal trimmer" which you are apparently supposed to stick up your nose. It's as if I didn't buy a shaver but instead bought a complete shaving lifestyle. Despite my blithe comments to the effect that this should be unlikely, it seemed to do a significantly worse job at beard-removal than my previous shaver.

In the end I threw it out. If you are considering a shaver, think twice about Wahl.

So, now I have a public opinion on shaving. Am I a man yet? Next up: how to wrestle bears.

* Hey, it beats "Look at me, I'm an INTP!"†
† The above-linked article was written by Joe Butt.‡
‡ "A major concern for INTPs is the haunting sense of impending failure."
** In sad news for fans of beard dualism, it turns out that, in fact, Plato had a beard.

I run Windows 7 using VMWare on my Mac, and recently I installed Windows Live Messenger so I could talk to Catie. The installation was sort of funny, with the installer asking me if I wanted to switch to Bing search (default "yes"), and showing me (some random Live Messenger user) messages like "Installing Microsoft Error Reporting for Applications" and "Installing installer". But I'm semi-familiar with the evil things that installers try to pull on you on Windows (just previously, the Camfrog installer had helpfully offered to install Norton something-something for no good reason), so I was expecting all of that. What I wasn't expecting was the chat program, when I eventually got to it, to be filled with ads.

There was an animated ad on the bottom of the window. When I started a video chat I got to see a 10-second video at the start telling me that "This video chat is sponsored by Commonwealth Bank". During the chat, there was a text ad at the bottom of the screen telling me about the benefits of studying online in 2010. Oh, and the video was all in black and white, giving the conversation an entertaining art-film aspect, but I'm prepared to blame VMWare for that one.

I don't want to come across as a complete Mac jerk (too late!) but the ads are ridiculous. Live Messenger is the closest to a Microsoft-endorsed chat program for Windows that there is (it evolved from MSN Messenger, after all, which if I'm not mistaken was actually bundled with Windows). iChat comes bundled with the operating system on a Mac, and it contains no ads. I paid for Windows, and if Microsoft (as a convicted monopolist) is concerned about bundling I would be happy to pay some small amount for Live Messenger too, but perhaps I'm in the minority here. If so, that's a problem.

Now let's talk about interface. Here is what I see when I start up Live Messenger (resized for your convenience):

Here is what I see when I start up iChat:

This isn't an entirely fair comparison (iChat is noisier when you first run it, and it does look like Live Messenger can be slimmed down), but I'm sure the ad quotient won't change. I also can't help but admire Microsoft's... audacity in providing a Bing search box, despite my search provider preferences.

Now iChat is far from perfect. It just seems like one of those situations where the alternative doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better.

If anybody knows of a good video chat program for Windows, please email me. At the moment I think Skype is the best, but it's not ideal because it doesn't really let you limit upload bandwidth.

AAARG CLICKING THE CLOSE BUTTON ON LIVE MESSENGER MINIMISES THE APPLICATION WHY DO SO MANY WINDOWS APPS DEFAULT TO THIS DESPITE HAVING A PERFECTLY FUNCTIONAL MINIMISE BUTTON IF I WANTED TO STAY ONLINE I WOULD NOT TRY TO CLOSE THE PROGRAM THAT KEEPS ME ONLINE.

Windows, huh?

I'm going to write something small each day until the end of March. I want to remind myself of small things in my life that aren't my thesis. Sorry if all this is too weird.

Mar 19. Toffee apples which are mostly toffee.
Mar 18. Muscarinic, nicotinic, atropine, lobeline.
Mar 17. Jeans: they make even nerds look cool.
Mar 16. The average geocacher. (/design)
Mar 15. Old-book smell.
Mar 14. That moment in a Western when the bad guy enters the saloon.
Mar 13. Slime mould.
Mar 12. Hax.
Mar 11. Ducks on the pond at Sydney Uni.
Mar 10. The fundamental interconnectedness of all things.
Mar 9. The Krebs cycle.
Mar 8. Non-minimalist industrial design.
Mar 7. The flash mob craze of 2003, 2004, and 2005; the miniature flash mob re-craze of 2008; and the flash mob ennui of 2009.
Mar 6. Bioluminescence.
Mar 5. Adults who maintain a semi-ironic interest in cartoons.
Mar 4. Water slides with not quite enough water in them.
Mar 3. The cold.
Mar 2. Playing piano music much more quickly than it should be played.
Mar 1. Non-dairy cheese substitute.
Feb 28. Terrible science fiction novels.
Feb 27. "Woman In Blues". (/paper)
Feb 26. Words like "bluff", "indubitably", and "torrential".
Feb 25. Easter egg chocolate.
Feb 24. 80s-era synthesisers for children.
Feb 23. Moving to another country. Well, this is kind of a big thing.
Feb 22. Arduino programming.
Feb 21. Sourdough. (/componentisation costs)
Feb 20. Crushing things underfoot!
Feb 19. Finding the best baklava in the world.
Feb 18. Daal with enough spices.
Feb 17. 8-bit platform games.
Feb 16. Slinkies which only go down two and a half stairs. (/background, /changes 1)
Feb 15. One of those Japanese ghosts which have no legs, so must crawl along the floor.
Feb 14. o2 c2 c1 c1 o1 b2 b2 b2 b1 b1 o2 c2 c2 c2 c1 c1 c2 c2 o1 b2 a1 b1 o2 c2
Feb 13. Not being up at 3am... oh who am I kidding.
Feb 12. fsssht clunkfssht clunkfssssht clonk (/literature review)
Feb 11. click click zzzzzuuuuuuuup
Feb 10. clunk clunk clunk
Feb 9. Oh no! Perspex devils!
Feb 8. Well, this is all getting a bit maudlin. Building a laser cutter.
Feb 7. Not having a hobby.
Feb 6. Having a hobby. (/introduction)
Feb 5. Swimming.
Feb 4. Hamlet, in love with the old man's daughter, the old man thinks.
Feb 3. Persistent soap scum, light pink.
Feb 2. Red onions, chopped into long strips, and dropped into a hot, oiled saucepan.
(Feb 1)

(This is me envisioning myself having the experiences that this guy had. Disclaimer: I use Vim, but, to be fair, I use it on a Mac.)

Do you have friends that always, no matter what you do, have some opinion about how you could be doing it better? You probably do, since you're probably a nerd, since you're reading a blog post on text editors. I certainly have these sorts of friends. In fact, I started using Emacs back when my friend -- one of those friends -- started talking about how great it was. I was a Vim user, but Emacs, said my friend, was so superior that it could actually emulate lesser editors like Vim.

This proposition intrigued me. Why would an Emacs user spend hours of his or her time to emulate Vim? Was it sheer masochism? Some absurd display of talent? Or did I detect a hidden longing for the Other?

In any case, this guy just wouldn't stop badgering me about Emacs, so I downloaded it just to shut him up. Started it up, and -- wouldn't you know it -- the backspace key didn't work. It turns out that ctrl-H is bound to "provide help" rather than "delete a character" -- somewhat oddly, for an editor which has existed since the time when "ctrl-H for backspace" was fairly standard behaviour. Anyway, I say "provide help", but not, of course, the kind of help that I could actually use to configure the keyboard. For that I turned to my old friend Google. Within .004 seconds I had over 3 million pages telling me how to fix the problem. But the solution was pretty freaking weird:

(global-set-key "\C-h" 'delete-backward-char)

This is of course a programming language, and you use it in exactly the same way you would use Vim's scripting extensions. Emacs scripting is better though, for two reasons. Firstly, it is legitimately more powerful than Vim's scripting language -- though not for any of the scripts that I have actually written. Secondly, and far more importantly, Emacs uses a Lisp dialect. Lisp is both very old and very arcane, and is for some reason surrounded by a reverent mysticism that other languages of the same era, such as COBOL, just don't enjoy. Well-known writers such as Paul Graham call it a "secret weapon", inspiring people to, for example, write famous web sites in Lisp, and then to re-write them in Python when they realise that there is no reasonable standard library or community support for any Lisp except the one built into a certain text editor.

Back to Emacs. I felt amazed. I had just written a program. I was customising the very core of the editor -- in fact, every time I pressed a key, Emacs ran code that I could modify. And not modify by learning C, but modify by learning Lisp! This was kind of like modifying Vim with Vimscript, except slower. And, indeed, Emacs was slow as a dog. It started up way too slowly for me to run "emacs" each time I wanted to edit something, which is what I had been doing with Vim.

To get around the slowness problem I once again used Google, rather than Emacs' built-in help, because pressing ctrl-H just deleted things now. It turns out that the best way to avoid the speed issues is to start Emacs in the background and just let it run the entire time. Rather like what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer 4, but, you know... cool.

Emacs has a great mode to deal with revision control, called "vc-mode". And I really should have stopped with that, but now I had the Emacs religion. I started thinking about what other things I could run in Emacs. It turns out that lots of things we do nowadays are text-based. Such as IRC, and... um, well, that's about it really. Instant messaging, unless you want to video chat or include inline pictures. Email, unless you want to send as HTML, view attachments, or drag and drop anything. Web browsing is right out. You can use it to write a "to-do" list, though. No problem at all.

Since I'm a programmer, I wrote heaps of scripts for Emacs. I wrote one that removes carriage returns, because I don't use "tr" any more, because I never leave Emacs. I'm not quite sure what the last bit does, because I clagged it from some site on the Net. I also wrote a thing to resize my windows for me, and something else to allow me to load custom "session configurations". I hadn't ever done any of these things in Vim, despite being a hardcore Vim user for several years. I'm not sure why.

I am enjoying my developing relationship with my little friend (by which I mean Emacs), and can't wait to see what the future holds!

1. "Ladies and gentlemen, at the present time, there is a good service on all London Underground lines."
2. "Sorry for the delay -- it's due to this train arriving slightly early. We'll be moving shortly."
3. "Mind the closing doors ladies and gents. Mind the closing doors. Alright ladies and gents, we'll try one more time. When I say 'mind the closing doors', and the chimes are ringing, that's not a time for you to try and commit hari kari."