Genetic interactions suggest that Buffy acts downstream of Reaper, Grim and Head involution defective, and upstream of the apical caspase Dronc.

— Buffy, from The Interactive Fly

280slides is a presentation app written in a new Web framework called Objective-J, which is a port of the Cocoa APIs to JavaScript along with an Objective-C-like syntax. There’s an interview with the developers here, but it’s audio and frankly not that enlightening: for example, they respond to questions about implementation detail with “that’s all just implementation detail” and “we use the technology available”. Probably the most interesting part is that the developers consider using Objective-J to be working at a higher level than using other Web frameworks. While other frameworks try to co-exist with each other, Objective-J assumes it owns the DOM, intercepts all events (to support its own event mechanism), etc etc. As a result, the app doesn’t look like a Web app. It reminds of Java’s Swing, at least in the early days, where Swing apps looked obviously different to native apps, usually worse, and all your keyboard shortcuts wouldn’t work because the Swing guys decided that being cross-platform was more important than being usable on any particular platform. Oh yeah, and you couldn’t use any of the standard system dialogs (such as a file selector) because Swing had its own, nastier, one. Gah. Bad memories.

Even so, 280slides is a pretty fantastic program. It looks great and feels very much like a desktop app. Maybe not looking (or behaving) like a Web app isn’t such a huge deal when most Web apps look terrible.

I found a good plot summary of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull online. Warning! Spoilers.

Mutt picks then to enact his brilliant escape plan, which consists of punching the guard, then running, and setting the tent they went through on fire.

SPALKO: Curses! We’ll never catch them now! 

DOVCHENKO: Couldn’t we just go around the burning tent?

SPALKO: And walk over the Ground of Middling Discomfort? SILENCE!

Plot summary

As Raphael’s hand caressed Leonardo’s firm, green thigh, he sighed and smiled down at the blue-masked turtle. “One day, you’ll take off that mask, Leo,” he whispered, stroking the shivering, exhausted turtle. “One day,” Leonardo responded, pushing Raphael back on his shell, his strength suddenly returning in a rush of arousal… god ok i can’t write any more ahaha

— Catie speculating on how Anaïs Nin would write fiction if she were a blogger after reading this article

Last year some teenagers broke into Robert Frost’s house, had a party, and trashed the place. As part of their punishment, they are being forced to take poetry classes, starting with “The Road Not Taken” which is, as far as I’m concerned, Geneva Convention-scale poetic torture.

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” [Middlebury College professor Jay Parini] thundered, reciting the opening line of the first poem, which he called symbolic of the need to make choices in life.

“This is where Frost is relevant. This is the irony of this whole thing. You come to a path in the woods where you can say, `Shall I go to this party and get drunk out of my mind?”’ he said. “Everything in life is choices.”

Even the setting had parallels, he said: “Believe me, if you’re a teenager, you’re always in the damned woods. Literally, you’re in the woods — probably too much you’re in the woods. And metaphorically you’re in the woods, in your life. Look at you here, in court diversion! If that isn’t ‘in the woods,’ what the hell is `in the woods’? You’re in the woods!”

 
Frost house vandals learn about poetic justice, CNN

From GraphJam 

(Disclaimer: yet another programming ramble. I'm sorry.)

Okay, there is definitely something cultural, if that is the word I'm after, about the Ruby world's delight in giving things poetic, yet essentially meaningless and distracting, names. I think this enforced cuteness is basically because everyone is trying to copy Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, which is, as far as I can tell, the original cloyingly-cute Ruby document. Case in point: the introduction is about why the author wants you to have an onion with you when you read his book: "I’ll be straight with you. I want you to cry. To weep. To whimper sweetly. This book is a poignant guide to Ruby. That means code so beautiful that tears are shed. That means gallant tales and somber truths that have you waking up the next morning in the arms of this book. Hugging it tightly to you all the day long. If necessary, fashion a makeshift hip holster for Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, so you can always have this book’s tender companionship."

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby doesn't get any less annoying, but its author at least has the decency to be tongue-in-cheek during his self-exploratory narrative excursions, it's full of cartoons, and through the whimsical ramble you can sense that he has a point, that he is leading somewhere. Having a point is a neat trick which not everyone can pull off successfully.

The culprit this time is titled The Narcissism of Small Code Differences. Here the guy starts with a text processing problem (padding a zip code) and then immediately veers into Unrealistic Cute Categorisation Happy Land, randomly dividing programmers into Agnostics, who are pragmatists, Ascetics, who are generalists, Librarians, who ... uh, like using library functions, and Purists, blah blah blah, each with good intentions but secret fatal flaws! Each programmer-stereotype then rewrites the code according to their preferred style, and in doing so changes the behaviour of the function. As you'd expect, each rewrite is accompanied by a moralising paragraph or two about how narrow-minded they are being.

To quote a friend of mine, this is about as subtle as an axe between the eyes, but the worst bit is that by the end of the article the problematic characteristic of the coders (it turns out) isn't their tendency to generalise, or library-ify, or what have you, it's just that they rewrote this guy's code and made assumptions about how it should behave without asking him.

Which is a reasonable thing to point out, but you can make assumptions just as well regardless of how many library functions you use -- the problem isn't that the programmers have a favourite way of programming, it's that they were arrogant and / or stupid.

It just seems like a whole lot of words to write, essentially, "some programmers are jerks".

My programming advice to you is "don't be a jerk". I'm also (experimentally) testing this advice with other facets of my life, though apparently not my blogging.

I found funny.txt and funny2.txt!

funny.txt, funny2.txt.

I’ve discovered the disposable coffee cups at Uni come with a lid which has two holes: a large one, for drinking coffee from, which goes in my mouth, and a small one, to allow airflow into the cup, which is conveniently blocked by my nose whenever I take a drink. This results in an unsatisfying coffee experience and, occasionally, small suction marks on my nose.

The top of the coffee cup has a diameter of about 4.5cm, for about 16 square centimetres of surface area. My nose covers a circle with a diameter of about 1cm, depending on how hard I squish it. The air hole has a diameter of about 2mm, and a centre point which co-incides almost exactly with the centre point of the nose circle.

Now obviously if you were going to place an air hole you wouldn’t want it near the drinking hole, because when the cup was tilted liquid would cover both holes, resulting in either leakage or bubbles. But even if you restricted youself to one hemisphere, that’s still an impressive 8 square centimetres of usable space in which to make a 2mm hole.

“University students randomly assigned to sit with their arms crossed spent more time on an impossible-to-solve anagram, or word scramble, in one experiment”

Ha-ha! Take that, university students! (Article via Fark)

“When Toby Barlow set out to write his first novel, Sharp Teeth, he knew he wanted to tell a story about love, and werewolves, in modern Los Angeles.

But why did he choose to write it in free verse?”

— The auspicious beginning of the “NPR: Books” podcast for 2008-03-23

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/04/internet-pants.html

Yesterday I made a 2-alarm Tuscan-style bean stew!

 

Happy world tapir day!

Tapirs are those fun-loving ungulates with the prehensile lips native to Malaysia and parts of Southern and Central America. All four tapir species are endangered, in part due to loss of habitat.

You can donate to tapir conservation efforts at the world tapir day Website or by buying something at the Tapir Preservation Fund store, such as a classic “T is for Tapir” T-shirt.

(Thanks for the link, Catie!) 

These are usually boring but I liked the command line whoever originated the meme came up with.

~> history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head 
   217	make
    58	gdb
    38	whois
    29	ssh
    28	python
    20	tools/symbrun
    19	hg
    18	less
    14	ls
    14	cd
 ~>  

Also, I like Charles Miller’s version.

There’s a well-known modder named “Ben Heck” who mostly, these days, turns video game consoles into laptops. It clearly takes a lot of skill to do this, but I just didn’t really care — who wants a PS3 in laptop form, when it’s all about the big screen? But all that changed with his most recent creation, an Apple IIGS laptop. I love it!

A couple of weeks ago I moved out of a sharehouse and into a single-bedroom place in Mosman. I'd been nervous about moving out by myself for the duration of my PhD because I was worried that the isolation would send me insane.

Well, it's been three weeks, and I haven't gone insane. In fact, it's been fantastic. I can invite people over without wondering what my housemate is doing / going to do sometime later, the place looks presentable, I can play my bizarre music with impunity, and I can walk around without wearing pants whenever I like (though I never actually do this. I always wear pants. Always.) I really like my place and would recommend it to anybody. This brings me to my next point, which is that you are all informally invited for dinner and/or bizarre music at some point. Or, if you'd prefer a formal invitation, you should come to my housewarming, which I haven't organised yet.

More sanity updates to follow as events warrant.

I can finally refrigerate things, so if you’ve got anything that has to stay cool, let me know!