Journal of Omnifarious

High weirdness from rosencrantz319

Tue, 13 May 2008 22:55:36 GMT

It's the Spongebob Squarepants Musical Rectal Thermometer. I was informed of its existence in a this post by rosencrantz319.

The mind boggles. One wonders if this heralds a new era of rectal musical devices of all kinds. I suspect that the Golgafrinchin marketroids who were wondering if people wanted fire that could be fitted nasally were completely missing the boat.

Business plan

Tue, 13 May 2008 00:18:31 GMT

I have a business idea that I strongly suspect is viable. I'm looking for someone who knows how to write business plans who's willing to help me write one up.

It is both product and service based. I suspect the time from getting the money to buy some hardware and tinker to having a viable product is about 2-3 months. I can see several different avenues the business could grow from the first product.

Persistent vegetative state often not so vegetative

Mon, 12 May 2008 12:45:43 GMT

Apparently many patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state are misdiagnosed. Most of the time such patients are not even subjected to well known and understood scans for brain activity.

So, maybe the Republicans were right so long ago, even if for all the wrong reasons. Maybe if even one of the grandstanding politicians from that one case so long ago had mentioned something like this instead of making it into a religion based moral argument things would've gone differently, people would've been educated and lives could've been saved.

Eating is good

Sat, 10 May 2008 02:45:22 GMT

I sometimes forget exactly how useless I can be if I don't eat. I'm feeling much better and more alert now that I've eaten.

On the plus side, this morning my weight hit a new low. Not very much lower than the previous new low. But at this rate in a month or two I'll weigh less than I have since I was in HS.

zanfur knows how to configure a network

Tue, 06 May 2008 21:36:35 GMT

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.

Another geeky pick-up line

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:01:09 GMT

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.

My main workstation has died

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:06:35 GMT

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.

Yesterday... seemed so

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:41:20 GMT

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.

This makes me sad

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 18:58:05 GMT

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.

The most amusing and creative analogy I've read in a long time

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:09:23 GMT

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. :-)

I'm going to be giving a talk on IPv6!

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:18:47 GMT

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.

Different neurochemistry

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 09:54:55 GMT

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.

Watching 21

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:03:11 GMT

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.

A post for rosencrantz319

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:28:13 GMT

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!

Overdoing caffeine

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:28:49 GMT

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.

Good news politically!

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:22:55 GMT

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.

This is interesting

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:48:06 GMT

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.

LJ got rid of basic accounts with no ads

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:20:50 GMT

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.

Time change and computers

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:28:20 GMT

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.

10,000 BC is a dud

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 04:13:04 GMT

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.

Telecom Immunity up for vote again

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:32:28 GMT

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.

I've been a bit inspired, but also sick

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 04:57:59 GMT

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.

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.

I'm powerful sick

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:56:35 GMT

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.

Thoughts on Thrift and D-BUS

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 04:30:33 GMT

I've been thinking about Thrift and D-BUS ever since I made this post: Java and XML, bad tastes that are worse together. And then I followed up with a reference to my paper: why CORBA and other forms of RPC are a bad idea.

Those, of course, sparked a lot of discussion. Questioning Java and XML, the darlings of 'Enterprise' computing, would hardly pass without comment. It provoked even more of a strong reaction than I'd expect I'd get from questioning AGILE methodologies.

One person though ask me a really good question. Why did I think D-BUS and Thrift were better?

I had to think carefully about my enthusiasm for these two things, and I've reached some conclusions...

First, I like D-BUS a lot better. The problem domain involves communications between processes on a single computer. Context switch overhead is a big deal here, but latency isn't. Also, many encoding issues are greatly simplified in this sort of environment, though D-BUS handles those well regardless.

There are several things I like about D-BUS. There is a consistent naming scheme for referring to D-BUS objects and interfaces. Interfaces are generally expected to support an interface for describing the interface. So they're self-describing. There is a heavy emphasis on notifications and events. So much so that frequently the return you get from a function call is not the real return and you're supposed to expect a notification later that whatever you asked for has finished. Very asynchronous. And the format of messages is a self-describing binary format designed to support a reasonable set of datatypes and user-defined compositions (aka structs). There is a reasonably heavy emphasis on data. Notifications are all about getting the right data to the right thing so it can do whatever it needs to do with it. Very few imperative 'you must do X in such and such a way or I will be very upset' sort of messages are passed.

D-BUS is RPCish, but many of the things I really dislike about RPC are either non-issues in D-BUS' environment, things D-BUS handles better than most RPC systems or both.

Thrift is not nearly so well designed. The main positive thing it has is a nice language agnostic method of describing a data structure in a way that allows for clever upgrades of that data structure later without breaking old servers or clients.

Thrift is not inherently self-describing. There isn't even a standard for asking an object implementing Thrift to send you its IDML, whereas D-BUS actively encourages objects to implement a standard interface for this.

Thrift has the concept of async methods that return as soon as they've made it to the transport. But the methods are still very function-call like, and they encourage thinking of imperative 'do this, change your state in this way' sort of messages. I asked on the Thrift channel about an 'idempotent' method modifier for a method that could be implemented via HTTP GET and people were puzzled as to why I'd even want such a thing. The idea of using RPC to implement REST were met with general puzzlement.

Lastly there is no standard way of naming objects in Thrift. And the HTTP transport that comes by default just assumes it will be sending data via POST requests to http://something:port/, not much of a standard for naming the thing you're talking to at all.

So, Thrift as it stands is very poor for implementing random publicly accessible services.

But providing a language independent way to describe data structures is pretty darned nifty. The closest things I know of that are widely deployed on the wild Internet are JSON, ASN.1 and XDR. JSON is ugly and designed for Javascript Ajax clients. ASN.1 is just plain horribly ugly, overdesigned and a bear to parse. Given that ASN.1 comes out of OSI-land and they gave us such glorious gems as X.500, this is really no surprise. (Strangely, it's used for SNMP. What does that tell you about the S in SNMP?) XDR is not very self-describing in the data stream (from what I remember) has a bad name in other ways because it was associated with an awful RPC implementation from Sun, and is missing a map type.

I've been thinking that having web pages for interacting with data that will return a Thrift encoding of the data if passed an application/x-thrift Accept header might be interesting. They could even accept application/x-thrift data in HTTP POST or PUT requests. This would allow you to use URLs to name objects and a fairly efficient, easily parsed protocol encoding for sending the data needed to manipulate them.

Good, solid reasons to support Obama over Clinton

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:58:39 GMT

Basically, if you look at their records it's clear who has a broader and deeper range of legislative interests and who is better at gathering political will. I Refuse to Buy into the Obama Hype (now a supporter)

As for myself, I've been an Obama supporter for awhile, mostly because I like his rhetoric. I've never liked Hillary. I think she's a political opportunist who always picks the most politically expedient choice. I think she's a business-as-usual candidate.

Obama sells himself as someone who isn't. His rhetoric and the talks he gives are consistent with this view. I saw a talk he gave at Google, and while I didn't necessarily agree with his solutions since he's a Democrat and I'm libertarianish, I really liked that he saw that there was a real problem that needed solving. Particularly with his ideas about open government and using the Internet to foster greater citizen participation in government. He presented a consistent, clear picture of himself as someone who was committed to making real changes for the better in how our government operated.

I think we need someone who is not a business-as-usual candidate. I think we need someone like that very badly.

That being said, I was really pleased to read what I linked to above. Because despite all of Hillary Clinton's hype about having more experience, it's clear that Barack Obama both has a broader scope of legislative interests, and is more effective at implementing them than Hillary Clinton is. So the experience argument doesn't hold water.