Obsolete Your Idols

You may recall that I have long supported impeachment for this administration. I remember promises to restore dignity and honor to the office. I remember promises to protect the environment, the Constitution, and the country.

So now there's Yet Another Impeachment Effort. I don't have a lot of optimism that this puppet show will go anywhere but what the hell, I put my name on the list.

I'd rather be rioting in the streets but, you know, I've got bills to pay. You could go add your name to the list. Or not. Don't do something just because I told you to do it, that's the stupidest reason to do something. But do think about whether sufficient treason has been committed by these short-sighted selfish criminals.

Over the past day I've been setting up some new accounts with services I've not used before but been aware of (you can read that with an air of contempt, if you like) and thinking about what is working for me and what isn't.

Some very preliminary thoughts:

• I really like cdbaby's Sounds Like search, perhaps because it's built on input from the artists, themselves, but the UI is maybe too basic as it doesn't give me any confidence rating for the similarity
• the difficulty for posting to livejournal is, obviously, very low and if I were a person who was not interested in learning new skills, it would be a very stress-less path toward expressing myself and seeking community
• pownce will really only be useful to me when a critical mass of people are sharing pr0n files
• habbo hotel scares me before I even try to make an account, just hitting the front page; I think this makes me officially Too Old using a metric I read recently: if the tools of connectivity are a barrier, you are Too Old

Yes, I did just create a livejournal account this morning but it wasn't just to comment on Nick's lj. That was just a nice side effect.

I did it to continue my goal of providing five nines of tech support to Vy who is dipping her toe in the livejournal tub to see how the water feels to her. So stop in if you know her and say hi, at whichever site of hers you like.

As I write this, there's more content at vylarkaftan.net but who knows whether that will be the same by the time you read this.

A co-worker helped me celebrate System Administrator Appreciation Day by buying me a beer at House of Shields tonight.

This: is the beer I bought for myself after.

Never been to House of Shields before and it took me forever to spot any shields. I was expecting something more like a shield wall. I guess that would be too gaudy for a crowded place full of shouting people watching everyone else.

New record minimum, though: only one person spilled beer on me while I was sitting at the bar.

I won something! Which never happens. Specifically, I won $20 in store credit from my favorite book store, Powells. I won it by writing a review of Move Under Ground and having it picked for the Daily Dose.

The only down side is that since I first signed up for the Daily Dose I've seen a lot of books I want and wish-listed them so now I am trying not to use up all of my credit all at once. My day is in this Daily Dose archive near the bottom (oh, I crack myself up).

Note that if you want to buy the book without giving me any affiliate store credit, you'll want to use the link to the archive and go from there. The book title itself in my first paragraph is affiliate coded as is the search box at the top of this site.

Because Vy is awesome, she buys me books.

Most recently she bought me Under My Roof by Nick Mamatas and I just finished reading it.

First, some digressions.

I know Nick. Have known him years, first as a quirky and amusing set of pixels forming acerbic text and later as a more tangible manifestation of cynicism.

I've read all three of his novels, now, shortly after they've been printed.

I remember when I read Northern Gothic I was puzzled by something and so I connected to the online place where I knew he hung about. I said, "Hey, NK, I just read your book and I have a question." He said, "NO, I'm not gay!"

So I never asked him my question, which was, "But why is the ghost haunting the dildo?"

Which is to say, I think I have trouble making these simple and fundamental connections which infuse his stories.

His second novel, Move Under Ground didn't confuse me so much but that's because I don't expect the Beatnik novels to have any kind of closure or to ever really be about anything I can make sense of and the Lovecraftian fusion in it, well, that was just gravy and pandering to the audience of People Like Me. All, uh, 12 of us on the planet or whatever.

Now I've read Under My Roof and I've got one question which has confounded me (aside from what seems to be some fairly bad copy editing) and that is: How does Geri drive away in the car which Daniel just pages earlier sold and had Herbert help him pretend was a car jacking?

But that's enough digressions about my confusion so now I'll talk about the book itself.

It's short.

It's really short. Like, 150 pages short. Is this Young Adult fiction? Probably, hence the lack of length. It moves at a good clip and uses some good devices to keep the story engaging and skip over the boring parts.

It's a coming of age story for all ages. Various characters grow up, grow down, or grow in circles. There's some clever science-y bits and some strong female characters and suitably wry grown-ups-don't-get-kids observations from the young point of view character, who is arguably the protagonist though his struggles are few and far between and he mostly observes distantly the meaty bits of the narrative.

Who might like this book

• kids who are misunderstood by adults
• adults who are misunderstood by adults
• kids who are telepathic or want to be
• satirists, cynics, anarchists, iconoclasts, malcontents and commuters

Here are some domains mentioned in the novel which exist

• satmaps.com

Here are some domains mentioned in the novel which do not exist

• treatyonline.org
• mysonherbiethelovebug.org
• topplethegnome.com

So if you're looking for some domains to squat for when this novel becomes a movie, now's the time!

I went to BALUG last night because not only was it a pretty good price for deliciously unhealthy Chinese food, it was a chance to hear a person talking about the One Laptop Per Child project.

So, the most important thing first, the laptop itself. I gather this is called an XO model.

First impressions are that it's small. It bears the same relationship to a laptop, visually, that the undersized and plasticized versions of elements of the adult workaday world become children's toys so they can practice being good little cogs, tirelessly using their plastic saw, plastic oven, plastic cash register for the Good of their Owner.

So it's got that going for it.

The speaker (it says on the BALUG site that his name is Ed Cherlin and web searches seem to bear that out) demonstrated how the laptop can find and display wireless networks. He talked about how multiple units will peer and form a mesh network. They've tested this and had a fifty node network in a two mile radius around a central server.

The central server will ideally be connected to the Internet and if it isn't, have a sizable cache of useful content. So in optimal conditions, a user of the laptop peers with the server and through it reaches the outside world. Or the laptop peers with a laptop closer to the server and through it reaches the server and through the server reaches the Internet.

The laptops he showed are running a stripped down Red Hat Rawhide install, including a pared kernel. Because the platform has a known, fixed, and specific set of components the kernel and application can be tailored for just what it has and drop out what it won't ever need. Parallel port support, for example. There aren't any in it. Won't ever be any in it.

So the software load is small enough [presently] to go on a CD. The software updates can be put onto a thumb drive and I overheard unclearly that there's some magic for it detecting that there is a reboot-worthy update on the drive when it's inserted, applying it, and rebooting itself.

To quickly move data from server to server, because high speed Internet is an artifact of the kind of infrastructure in some of the countries with greater tech addiction, the plan is to have the server system have DVD-reading, CD-(re-)writing drives. Chunks of data in CD size can be exported and sneaker-netted to another server.

A user application was shown off, TamTam and it was pretty awesome. It displays a visual set of instruments, you select one, it synthesizes the sound of that instrument, notes mapped to the row of keys. Better still, if you're peered up with other laptops, it combines the notes from the peers with the one you're using. The audio can be recorded as you play it, remixed, edited, looped, and so on. One Laptop Per Musician!

Interested parties are urged to visit the OLPC wiki but mostly as contributors. If you're looking to buy one, you need to put together an order of a quarter of a million units at a touch under $180 each and wait in line while the one place on Earth making them fills the eight million unit backlog, first.

The components are made in China and assembled in Taiwan and the chip-set is AMD's.

I managed to re-swipe enough of the Holesque Grail to get every element I really care about back on this page. Needs more work, certainly, if only so I can understand what's going on here.

If you look at the css I'm using, I recommend not using it yourself. You're better served swiping as I swoped.

... hey, they are right, this CSS is all messed up and I've been playing with the DOM Inspector Tool so why don't I just fix it up real quick like.

If you happened to look at it during this time frame (Hi Drew!) that would explain the extra junk look it had at the time and the still not-quite-right it shows but I'm too tired to keep fiddling with it.

The categorytree is a casualty of this, at least in my web browser. It's an element in the DOM. Firefox 1.5 won't display it for me. What. The. Felch.

Come back later, it might be easier on the eyes.

Once upon a time I worked for a manager with an overtly unusual sense of humor.

An example would be an occasion on which he set up an automatic response in his email client to respond to anything he received from his boss with "That's an excellent idea, thank you for the suggestion." I guess that went on for a couple weeks before his boss caught on that it was scripted.

Similarly, at one point he loaned me a book which he said he thought reflected my attitude toward my job and my co-workers. He loaned me A Confederacy of Dunces.

Right.

I didn't see a whole lot of myself in that book but I wasn't offended. I was amused. Now that I've read a different book, I know what book he should have loaned me, the one which captured my sense of my career field.

Catch-22.

Everyone around me is insane. Many of them are trying to kill me. Some of them are trying to literally kill me, some are merely trying to expose me to fatally dangerous conditions.

Is it too late to become Milo Minderbinder, I wonder?

I won't try to actually review this book because you've either read it by now or nothing I can say will convince you to do what a stack of critics, pundits and probable friends have told you. I didn't get around to reading it until now because I am slow to appreciate classics. In a sense I'm very glad I didn't read it until now because it seems quite probable to me that at some earlier point in my life I could not have appreciated this novel, certainly not to the degree that I now savored the bureaucratic constriction.

So insofar as reviews of books often say more about the reviewer than the book, the important thing to know is this: if you work with me, I'm on to you!

I took the opportunity while catching up on my email to replace my hand-rolled rss2html based twitter stream at the top of my site with an actual proper twitter provided badge.

Also, I watched The Fountain and it was ... another opportunity to watch Hugh Jackman struggle against death. It was a pretty okay movie.

Sometimes I read the blogs of strangers and it inspires me.

Last night I read a tumblelog called Anarchaia which I think I probably found through some other stranger's blog on my curious staggers through the thoughts of people who code. In particular, the highlighted Thought on that page got me to thinking. So I tried scratching the itch in code and this is what fell out.

 #!/usr/bin/perl
 # splitrot by Shannon Prickett <binder@manjusri.org>
 # rotate vowels separately from consonants

 use strict;
 use warnings;

 #use Smart::Comments;

 my $consonant_string   = 'bBcCdDfFgGhHjJkKlLmMnNpPqQrRsStTvVwWxXzZ';
 my $vowel_string = 'aAeEiIoOuUyY';

 while (<>) {
     chomp;
     for my $letter (split //, $_) {
         my $rotted;
         if ($letter !~ qr{[$vowel_string]}msx) {
             $rotted = rot_n({ character => $letter, offset => 10, string =>
             \$consonant_string  });
         }
         else {
             $rotted = rot_n({ character => $letter, offset => 3, string =>
             \$vowel_string });
         }
         print $rotted;
     }
     print "\n";
 }

 sub rot_n {
     my $arg_ref = $_[0];
     my $character           = ${arg_ref}->{character};
     ### $character
     my $offset              = ${arg_ref}->{offset};
     my $letter_string_ref   = ${arg_ref}->{string};
     my $letter_string       = $$letter_string_ref;
     ### $letter_string

     if ($character =~ m{ [[:space:]|[:punct:]] }msx) {
         return $character;
     }

     my $character_index = index( $letter_string, $character );
     ### $character_index
     my $result_index = $character_index + ($offset * 2);
     ### $result_index
     if ($result_index > (length( $letter_string ) - 1)) {
         $result_index -= ($offset * 4);
     }
     ### $result_index

     my $return_letter = substr( $letter_string, $result_index, 1);
     ### $return_letter
     return $return_letter;
 }

That's not as horrible as I had feared it would be when all was said and done. Some examples:

 binder@death:~/src/r13$ ./splitrot 
 A man, a plan, a canal, SUEZ! 
 O zob, o cxob, o pobox, GEUM!
 O zob, o cxob, o pobox, GEUM!
 A man, a plan, a canal, SUEZ!
 You mean it just contradicts me all day?
 Iae zuob yh vegh pabhfoqyphg zu oxx qoi?
 Iae zuob yh vegh pabhfoqyphg zu oxx qoi?
 You mean it just contradicts me all day?
 binder@death:~/src/r13$

See? Reversible. Pronounceable? I don't think so. But you're free to pabhfoqyphg zu if you dare.

I've started trying to update the board game library at work.

That's right. I get paid to think about what games I want to play at work and then I get paid to play them. You wish you were me.

This week I picked up

• Stonehenge
• Carcassonne Big Box

but I don't anticipate getting any actual time to play this week what with my lunch date at E & O Trading tomorrow. So next Monday will probably be my first chance to sit down with one of those and get my game on.

Luckily I've got a day of boardgames going on Saturday and then D&D and Ars Magica on Sunday so, yeah, I really can't complain.

Here's the public profile I have on linkedin. Isn't it ... bland.

I made two trips to the co-location facility today.

First trip was terminated when I realized the install media had somehow become corrupt since I performed three successful installs with it.

Second trip was with fresh media and I went around in circles because once I had a good install of Ubuntu onto the Sun v20z I found that grub wanted to try to boot off of the first logical volume in the external T3 array. Even when I told it that the internal SCSI drive was (hd0), it wouldn't boot but now because it wanted to use a mythical IDE drive.

I finally resolved it by lying in /boot/grub/device.map and telling it to consider /dev/sdc to be (hd0). What a pain.

My clue that it was going off the rails was that it would boot, say GRUB and then ... stop. Bad disk geometry, no positive affirmation.

All that and I had time to sit in a meeting and have a vision of the future.

So today is Vy's birthday.

We tried to fulfill her childhood fantasy and the owner of our local franchise denied her after she'd already gotten an okay on it.

Baskin-Robbins sucks.

My former co-worker Oliver Marsh has moved on to do his Own Thing at Video Fantastica!. He was already doing his own thing at Dig Your Own Grave.

He's pretty selective in what gets on to DYOG; he declined to post the only link I ever sent him. Do stop in and take a look at his sites.

The venerable-in-computer-years Linksys WRT54G we use for home wireless became incapable of sustaining a wireless connection, no matter how I spun it, configured it, or hoisted it. I updated the firmware, no joy.

I bought a Netgear which looked like an upgrade in functionality, but which was even more cumbersome to configure, had similar problems sustaining connections and additionally added a connection timeout to the mix, even across wired circuits.

So I tried what I should have done in the first place.

I turned to one of the open-source firmwares for it, dd-wrt and it's worked like a champ all week. Not only that but the administrative interface is actually informative, the settings seem to actually change and, perhaps most importantly to me, it gives me a login shell.

So I'll be returning the Netgear for some other chump to waste money on. I hope this Linksys can go for a bit longer with the firmware upgrade.

Then we availed ourselves of an opportunity to hear Cecilia Tan speak at Borderlands Books. That was fun and funny. She's a witty speaker with clever anecdotes. The only downside to the trip was that I kept seeing books which I wanted to buy. Which I wouldn't get around to reading for maybe a year or more.