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 31. Sleep. (/changes 4, /dissertation)
Mar 30. A thousand and one installation programs by people who think they know best. (/conclusion, /abstract, /front matter, /changes 3)
Mar 29. Third-wave feminism. (/changes 2)
Mar 28. Computer nerds discussing philosophy. (/evaluation)
Mar 27. Hybris, the classic Amiga game.
Mar 26. Advertising on the Internet.
Mar 25. Mitochondria.
Mar 24. Voice dictation software.
Mar 23. Conceit.
Mar 22. People who have a lot of double-jointed body parts. (/implementation)
Mar 21. The ineluctable modality of the visible.
Mar 20. Music written for the 19 equal temperament scale.
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.”

Did you hear about the physicists who were on their way to a conference when their elevator’s cable broke, plunging them into freefall? Fortunately one of the physicists jumped at the last minute right before the car hit the ground, so they were all saved.

I am very mildly short-sighted, and I just got glasses. The world looks much more awesome now!

I bought some scales today and calibrated them so they showed 0 when I wasn’t standing on them. But since air is heavier than you’d think, shouldn’t I actually calibrate them a little past 0, to take into account the volume of the air that I displace when is stand on the scales?* Have I got this right? I suspect that the amount I should calibrate by would be less than half a kilogram, which is not enough for my scales to measure accurately.

Apparently this sort of calibration is called “bouncy correction”, and this site talks about it a little.

*Well, assuming I were some kind of measurement obsessive.

Google News results for articles making the “bite out of Apple” joke in the last two weeks: about 14. Given that two months ago there were 12, I have conclusively proven that, taken as a worldwide collective, journalists have no imagination and recycle the same puns practically every day.

My favourite NZ place names: Ohai, Cape Turnagain, Doubtful Sound, and Abut head.

Apple released a new mouse the other day, and I had a quick play with it today in an Apple store. It’s really pretty, but I don’t think it’s very good.

There is no scroll wheel, so in order to scroll you have to drag your finger across the surface. This is kind of tiring. Laptops with trackpads also make you drag your finger around, but when you’re using a trackpad your hand is oriented so you can move your whole hand rather than just the tip of your finger, and that makes it a lot easier.

There are no buttons on the top, so to click you push the whole mouse down. To right click you press the right side of the mouse down, and to left click you push the left side down. But if you have fingers on both sides of the mouse when you push one side down, it always registers as a left click. To right click you have to lift your left-button finger off the mouse. This is really annoying.

So yeah, don’t buy Apple mice.