Journal of Omnifarious

23:59 - To all of my friends

Could you also please friend hopper [omnifarious.org] by clicking here: and put that user (who is also me) in all the same groups you put me. If LJ ever lets you use your OpenID identity to log into an existing journal, this may be moot. but I'm not counting on that feature ever happening.

As an aside, if you click on the icon in hopper [omnifarious.org], it takes you someplace different than clicking on the hopper [omnifarious.org] does. The takes you to the LJ user info page, and the hopper [omnifarious.org] part takes you to the homepage for the ID.

Current Mood: working

14:36 - zanfur knows how to configure a network

I was poking about on Trabant's internal network and noticing a few interesting things. It is a much better configured wireless network than most I've been on. It's somewhat impressive even.

So, I go ask the staff who does it. One doesn't know and the other tells me a name that sounds familiar. Says he always wears a Utilikilt. I hunt down zanfur's LJ profile and show it to her. "Yep, that's him!".

Well... I have a few things I think could be done better about how this wireless network is set up, but not many. And the level of attention to detail is way, way higher than I've seen on any other coffee shop's wireless network, even at places like Tully's.

It's amusing to encounter people you already know, even indirectly, in random contexts.

Current Mood: impressed

13:54 - Another geeky pick-up line

I think of these periodically. I should collect them together someplace... :-)

This one is: "Oh, baby, you make me wanna collapse your state vector.".

It's quite possible that someone has thought of this before.

Current Mood: creative

10:57 - My main workstation has died

It died before, when I moved, and that was the power supply. It's died again now, and I suspect this time that it's something more serious like the video card or possibly one or both of the CPUs frying from overheating. The fans all turn on but the BIOS screen never comes up.

I want to replace it. The newer dual core AMD CPUs generate even less heat and are a lot faster. But replacing it with technology that mirrors the level of current I sprung for when I bought what I have now would run me about $3000, and I don't have that and won't have it anytime really soon. :-(

My monitor also needs replacing. It's a pretty nice LCD monitor from 2003, but it has problems. The main problem is that it gets muddy when things are moving or changing quickly because the pixel change lag is fairly high. The pixel change time is 25ms or so which means a maximum effective frame rate of 40 frames a second and anything faster is muddy. It's not even that great for watching DVDs. The secondary problem is that it is very slow (often a minute or more) to recognize that the video card is trying to bring it out of sleep mode. I usually get frustrated and push the signal select button to force it, but it's irritating.

Actually, scratch that, a pixel change rate of 25ms means an effective frame rate of 20 frames per second. This is because a pixel should be at the color it's supposed to be for at least half the time in order for it not to be muddy. 20 frames per second means a possible change in pixel color every 50ms leaving a pixel that takes 25ms to change to be at the new value for 25ms before changing again.

Current Mood: worried

11:41 - Yesterday... seemed so

Yesterday I got up after not nearly enough sleep to go down south to look at a motorcycle with cooncat that she'd seen advertised on Craigslist.

I know nothing about motorcycles. Even less nothing than the nothing I know about cars. I was along partly because spending time with cooncat would be fun, and partly as a second person to discourage nastiness on the part of the motorcycle seller.

It was interesting, a bit educational and fun. She ended up not buying it because the seller wanted her to take all the risks when it came to her taking a test drive. I don't think he was being that reasonable.

Then I took a nice nap and went out dancing. And that was a bunch of fun too.

Getting back on schedule to start my new job tomorrow is going to be interesting.

Current Mood: content

11:58 - This makes me sad

This is a really excellent article on why our birthrate has been falling: The Baby Boycott by Stephanie Mencimer.

Sadly, I think the article is pretty close to correct. I've been really sad to notice that women who are smart and capable (the ones I'd most like to have children with) are generally not very interested in having children.

One reason I've become interested in polyamory is that I feel it offers a partial way out of this problem by distributing some of the burden of raising children over more people. But it still is a real issue.

I'm not so much for all the government mandated stuff since I generally feel that lots of government mandated stuff is both inherently unfair and tends to backfire in unexpected ways. But I am interested in changing this situation in some way.

Current Mood: sad

14:09 - The most amusing and creative analogy I've read in a long time

Grad school is basically my only hope at this point, really. I'm working on a Japanese Linguistics / Psychology double-major. Like a transuranium element in a particle collider, this bizarre conglomeration can only exist in academia.

I was highly impressed and amused at the same time. :-)

Current Mood: amused

13:18 - I'm going to be giving a talk on IPv6!

I'm going to be giving a talk on IPv6 and how easy it is to set up at LinuxFest Northwest 2008!

I've never done anything like that before, but I feel pretty confident I'll be able to pull it off well. I've been in situations a few times in front of a whole ton of people and haven't done poorly, and this will be an exercise in high geekery and so I should be fine.

I signed up for the bus sponsored by pogo linux, but if anybody is going and feels up for giving me a ride, that would be really good.

Current Mood: excited

02:54 - Different neurochemistry

I was talking to someone about an upcoming flight that was going to be a very long flight. She was telling me that she had tranquilizers and was quite anxious about the whole thing, partly because it was going to be for so long.

I was quietly stunned. It was like being in an alternate reality. I can sort of see how being in that situation would cause so much anxiety for someone that they would want tranquilizers to deal with it. But in reality it's a totally foreign mental concept for me. It would never even occur to me in thinking about the flight that I would get anxious from the inactivity. I went on a trip to Australia once, and it was a 23 hour flight. I was totally unconcerned with this fact, and it wasn't a problem for me.

OTOH, thinking about going through the security checkpoints makes me feel nearly physically ill. I have a negative amount of trust for the authority involved in that kind of thing, and I have a really hard time placing myself in a position where it can be so easily exercised over me.

And that's really interesting to me. It's yet another data point on why some people who are using illegal drugs of various kinds are self-medicating for mental states they don't know how to do anything about that are not appropriate or comfortable for the situations they're in. Not that my friend was using illegal tranquilizers, it's just that her situation reminded me of that.

People are the same, except when they're different. And some of the differences are really fascinating.

Current Mood: contemplative

02:03 - Watching 21

I watched a preview of 21 with cooncat, mizemm and luchog. That was a happy thing and I'm glad I got to spend some more time with cooncat before she flies off to Japan.

But the movie was mediocre. It was a not-very-believable dramatization of a real-life event. The dialog was dumb. The main character is somehow supposed to be credibly having a discussion of the Newton-Raphson method (which is a pretty elementary method for root finding that you learn early in calculus) in a senior level course at MIT.

The drama was predictable and also dumb. None of the characters was particularly believable. The only interesting thing was the card counting techniques and how they worked the tables. And I bet they didn't describe the real card counting system they used.

This story survives solely on knowing that somehow somewhere real people used something approximating the techniques in the movie to win a lot of money at Vegas. It would've been really nice if Hollywood could've told the real story and done some actual filmmaking to make it interesting to an audience instead of gussying it up in fake drama and bad characterizations and making it a different (and much worse) story.

Current Mood: content

10:28 - A post for rosencrantz319

Doing up SCOs most recent doings as lines from Shakespeare plays: It's Shakespeare (almost).

Sadly, this is likely only really funny to people who've been follow the many-years long SCO stupidity. It's like reality TV, except with giant ponderous corporations and lots of lawsuits!

Current Mood: amused

16:28 - Overdoing caffeine

I greatly enjoyed Norwescon, not the least because I got to spend some quality time with a new friend. But I'm now suffering the aftereffects of having used a lot of caffeine while I was there. I can hardly focus on anything. It's almost disturbing. I hope it mostly goes away by tomorrow.

Current Mood: restless

17:22 - Good news politically!

I rarely post good news on the political front. But I felt after my exhortation earlier to call your representative about the telecom immunity thing that I should tell you all the result.

The House has rejected the concept completely in a number of strongly worded speeches given on the House floor representatives one-by-one stood up and told the administration that our country is ruled by law and not by presidential fiat. According to this article, the debate was rather impressive to see.

So people who bothered to call, you very likely did some good. Thank you. Everybody in the US should thank you.

Current Mood: pleased

12:48 - This is interesting

Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it. Ask for anything: latest movie watched, last book read, political leanings, thoughts on something, favorite type of underwear, explain an interest, whatever.

There is one caveat... There are a very few things I absolutely refuse to blog about. They aren't many, but they do exist. I will tell you if you've managed to hit one of those topics.

Current Mood: curious

09:20 - LJ got rid of basic accounts with no ads

I've thought about the demise of LJ for awhile. It's quite clear now from how the news wasn't mentioned in a news post, how it's being spun as 'making it easier for users to sign up' and various other things that LJ really doesn't care about it's users at all anymore. This was really quite predictable from the moment they started accepting advertising at all.

Brad Fitz, the person who started it all has a nice post in which he makes the most excellent observation that it's the users that create the whole reason people want to visit the site in the first place. This observation and a discussion of LJs legal status made me realize something.

The modern corporate structure is a wholly inadequate means of expressing the values and desires of the stakeholders in an organization where most of the value of that organization is created by what a corporation would think of as "its customers". Basically this legal framework has been shoehorned into serving a purpose it is wholly unsuited for because a corporation has only a very weak incentive to take the interests of all the people who create the stuff that enables its existence into account. Those users have made a huge investment into the site and that investment is almost completely ignored by the modern corporate structure and repeatedly leads to disaster when the corporation makes decisions at odds with its most important investors, the users of the site that it is a caretaker of.

User content sites need something other than a corporation, something where the organization is legally obligated to take the interests of those users into consideration as the most important factor in decisions made by the organization. I'm going to have to think for awhile to see if I can think of a structure that would work. It's tempting to think of some sort of trust or something quasi-governmental. I prefer structures that naturally and with very little oversight or intervention align the interests of all the participants.

Current Mood: contemplative

17:28 - Time change and computers

I woke up this morning and discovered my computer had a really different idea of what time it was from my watch and bedside clock. I didn't know the time change was due and it took me a bit to figure out what was up. At first I figured I just mis-remembered what I saw on the bedroom clock before I wandered in to read my email. :-)

I like running computers that keep their time internally in UTC and simply have a database of silly timezone rules that they apply before displaying the time. That's as it should be. It's irritating to me to realize that most people still set their BIOS clocks to local time.

I think the world ought to run on UTC and we should just keep in mind that people in different parts of the world wake up at different times. :-) And certainly any time stored anywhere ought to be stored in UTC and simply formatted for the right timezone on display.

Current Mood: pleased

20:13 - 10,000 BC is a dud

I made the mistake of seeing this movie on a whim without reading any reviews. It is an awful movie. Horrible dialog, bad special effects, corny unbelievable plot, tons of historical inaccuracies, just all around a bad movie.

The worst part is, I get the impression that the people putting it together didn't realize it was a bad movie. At every turn the narrator is telling us how much of a serious, epic story this is supposed to be. If you didn't realize that the narrator is intended to be serious it would be funny. As it is, it's just sad.

I almost left halfway through, which I've only done once or twice before. I just couldn't see it being worth my time, even after I paid money.

If you all want to see a decent cave man movie, go rent Quest for Fire. That one is truly excellent.

Current Mood: annoyed

07:32 - Telecom Immunity up for vote again

Telecom immunity is up for a vote in the House of Representatives again today. Please call your representative and ask that they not grant immunity. The telecom immunity issue is all about making sure that we never actually find out the scope and extent to which we're spied on. If they really wanted to reward these companies for doing their patriotic today they'd indemnify them (basically promise to soak up any damage awards), not grant immunity which will shut down the court cases and the resultant discovery that has already revealed many interesting things.

Please call your representative right now. The House had a backbone a couple of weeks ago. Let your representative know how much that was appreciated and ask for the same level of spine again.

Current Mood: worried

20:57 - I've been a bit inspired, but also sick

I've been pretty sick, but in the few productive hours I've had today and over the weekend, I've been working on this project I've been suddenly inspired to do, mostly because of the investigation required for me to write this post on Thrift, D-Bus and RPC.

I've been wanting a self-describing binary data format that's simpler and less ugly than ASN.1. I also wanted one in which an extremely fast parser could be built for fixed-length data structures known at compile time. Either through the use of an IDML (which would be optional) to generate code, or crazier techniques like template meta-programming in C++.

Anyway, I've finished a very preliminary first pass at a parser in Python. I've called the whole concept InBus after D-Bus from which it borrows a lot of ideas.

• Python code for InBus parser
• Documentation of type tag meanings.

There are several things I would change about this parser, and a few features I would like to add.

• Selected data types are currently variable length and I would like to introduce a '<count>' syntax for annotating these types with a length and thereby making them fixed-length. I would like to add this capability to the arbitrary precision integer type, the binary blob type, the string type and the array type.

• It needs a type for time that very explicitly states that the time is represented as a arbitrary-precision integer that encodes an offset (positive or negative) in seconds from some base time in UTC.

• I would sort of like to incorporate Thrift's idea of field tags so data structures could be upgraded in a backwards compatible way.

  My current idea for this is a variant of the tuple type that would require a field tag after every type element in the tuple.

Also, that parser is inefficient. Ideally it would build up the parse as one or more calls to Python's struct.unpack each of which would unpack multiple values. Right now, though struct.unpack is used fairly heavily it only ever (well, my fancy arbitrary precision integer parser not-withstanding) unpacks one element in any call.

Lastly, right now, it expects the type value to be immediately preceded by a type spec. That's a design mistake. The type spec and type value should be handled separately except for the 'variant' type.

This brings me to another couple of features I think would be interesting, but very tricky. It would be nice if 'variant' types could refer to a previously used 'variant' type. Partly for efficiency reasons, and partly for better clarity since one use of the variant type is to record information present in various derived classes of some base class. It would also enable encoding recursive data structures in a saner way. Additionally it might be nice to be able to refer to previously decoded values in some way for data structures that couldn't fit into a strict tree.

On interesting thing, I think you could conceivably use this type tag system to describe IP packet layouts or other binary formats that have existed previously.

Current Mood: contemplative

12:56 - I'm powerful sick

I haven't had an upper-respiratory illness hit me this hard for awhile. :-/ I hope it goes away soon, this is very irritating. I do not like feeling miserable.

Current Mood: sick