Dearest and most beloved of our customers, for are not all of our customers dear and beloved? when we* tell you that we will humbly deliver to you, for your gracious and considered review, a stable and mostly-’feature-complete’ Beta on Monday, the proper response does not include “So, I can put this into production Tuesday, right?”
Nor does an appropriate and measured reaction include “That’s great! Where’s [previously undiscussed feature 'x']?” Such questions can only lead to conflict, sadness, woe, recriminations, and angst such as the stuff of which great sagas are composed. Wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, and lamentations – all of these can be yours for such ill-considered speech.
Exactly who will be doing the bulk of said wailing, gnashing, rending and lamenting may be open to some question. Rest assured, however, that you will do your share.
That is all.
[*] “We” meaning the development team and/or the management – preferably ‘and’, but that’s a whole ‘nuther blog post.
Posted by protected static as geek at 7:19 PM UTC
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Not that our house has ever truly been a monoculture – at any given time we have a doddering Compaq Win2K desktop, a new-ish Dell WinXP desktop, at least 1 XP laptop, 1 Mac OSX Powerbook & 1 i-Mac (purple, thanks for asking…) running… uh… Mac OS 9.x, I think. Don’t ask me – all I know is that it’s a Mac and it’s purple.
And that’s without counting the PDAs & Java-enabled cellphones… But last night, a penguin joined our household: I brought home a 2nd laptop from work, an ancient and twitchy Fujitsu that’s running Red Hat Fedora Core 5.
Why? As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been keeping an eye on Novell’s Mono project, and my (Windows-centric) office wants to evaluate it as a development environment… We’re doing more work with academics, and, well, it’d be a decent business move on our part to incorporate more Open Source software into our arsenal.
Despite Microsoft’s efforts to woo the University of Washington with sweetheart pricing deals, there’s still a lot of support for and interest in Open Source software at UW. Seeing as how much of our current development is done in C#/.NET, being able to use that codebase on Mono could make it easier to port our software to Linux, which in turn could make us a more attractive candidate for inclusion on grants that required custom software development.
So far I like it – it may be the machine that it’s running on, but I don’t see a whole lot of difference in performance between Fedora & WinXP. On the plus side, I haven’t seen anything about it that would prevent me from making this my working (or home) environment, either…
My big question now is this: as a Windows programmer who’s never bothered with the ins and outs of hardware or OS support, what’s the best way to acquaint myself with the arcana of Linux?
At any rate, I’m looking for recommendations. Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?
Posted by protected static as geek at 8:43 AM UTC
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Wow… I’ll let this speak for itself:
The line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot blurrier. European researchers have developed “neuro-chips” in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together.
The achievement could one day enable the creation of sophisticated neural prostheses to treat neurological disorders, or the development of organic computers that crunch numbers using living neurons.
To create the neuro-chip, researchers squeezed more than 16,000 electronic transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto a silicon chip just 1 millimeter square in size.
How cool is that?
Posted by protected static as 30-second science blogging, geek at 8:21 PM UTC
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…you’re living in a “Mommy, mommy” joke?
Mommy, mommy, why am I running in circles?
Victims described how they were beaten with canes,whips, hosepipes and metal rods, and how other victims were forced to watch as their family members were tortured in front of them.
In a report dated February 11[, 2003], Amnesty [International] said other methods of physical torture de-scribed by victims include the use of falaqa (beating on the soles of the feet), extinguishing of cigarettes on various parts of the body, extraction of fingernails and toenails and piercing of the hands with an electric drill.
— The Sunday Business Post (Ireland), 23 March 2003, “Gruesome details emerge of Iraqi torture methods”
Shut up kid…
A little lower are a series of horizontal welts, wrapping around his body and breaking the skin as they turn around his chest, as if he had been beaten with something flexible, perhaps a cable. There are other injuries: a broken nose and smaller wounds that look like cigarette burns.
An arm appears to have been broken and one of the higher vertebrae is pushed inwards. There is a cluster of small, neat circular wounds on both sides of his left knee. At some stage an-Ni’ami seems to have been efficiently knee-capped. It was not done with a gun – the exit wounds are identical in size to the entry wounds, which would not happen with a bullet. Instead it appears to have been done with something like a drill.
— The Observer/Guardian (UK), 3 July 2005, “Revealed: grim world of new Iraqi torture camps”
…or I’ll nail your other foot to the floor.
THERE was no sign of danger as Mohammed Sammarai arrived at his brother Mustafa’s home for lunch last week, no hint that this would be their last meal together.
It was not until after they had been joined by their old friend Ali Ahmad that they heard a commotion outside and realised something was wrong. Even then, the three men — all government employees, all Sunnis — had no inkling of the terrifying events that were about to overwhelm them.
[...]
“I walked home barefoot in a terrible state,” [Ahmad] said. “I could not call any official to report this. How could I when they were involved?” Two days later he found his friends’ bodies in the city’s Teb al-Adli mortuary. Mustafa’s right eye had been gouged out and his right leg broken. Other parts of his body appeared to have been penetrated by an electric drill, an increasingly common tool of torture in Iraq.
Mohammed’s body bore similar injuries. Both men had been shot in the head.
— The Sunday Times Online (UK), 5 March 2006, “‘Driller killers’ spread a new horror in Iraq”
Yeah. I didn’t think it was funny either.
Posted by protected static as politics at 7:52 PM UTC
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Ah… just got back from seeing the arrogant-but-talented Andrew Eldritch and his current incarnation of The Sisters of Mercy… Oh, and Doktor Avalanche, of course. Wouldn’t be The Sisters without the good Doktor. It wasn’t the best show I’ve ever seen them do, but overall I’d give it a solid B+. The opening act was a weird fit – the former lead singer for The Catherine Wheel did a solid solo set of material from his new album, and closed with “Black Metallic”. He was good, but not what the crowd was there for, and not what had been advertised (I wonder what happened to The Warlocks – I’d heard some of their samples online, they’d have probably been pretty good. Of course, maybe that was the problem… Andrew does not like to share the spotlight.).
The sound sucked intermittently, there was way too much fog (setting off the fire alarms towards the end of the show), but it wasn’t a bad set, with lots of ‘old’ and ‘new’ (‘Vision Thing’ counting for most values of ‘new’) – there were a couple of truly new songs, so maybe he is finally coming out with a new album!
Ouch. Okay, I think I strained my sarcasm gland on that one…
I do have to ask what the fuck was up with the crowd? Man, that was one of the uglier crowds I’ve been in for a while – there was a lot of pushing & shoving, and Seattle isn’t usually like that, even when you’re right in the thick of it. That’s the closest I’ve come to brawling in a club in, like, more than a decade… On the cool side, since it was an all-ages show, there were a bunch of parents with their kids there – most of the kids looked to be around 8 or 9 years old. We were really close up to the stage, and towards the end, a mom came through with her little girl who promptly got (somewhat cramped) red carpet treatment – she got right up to the front, wound up on some random guy’s shoulders – she got to see it all, all through the last couple of numbers and the encores. She even scored some guitar picks – both guitarists saw her, and one reached over and expressly passed the picks to her.
That was probably the best part of the night ;-)
Youth – so wasted on the young…
Posted by protected static as random at 12:21 AM UTC
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“…until you meet the enemy.”
So saith our President, in his second press conference this year, by way of defending Rumsfeld and his prosecution of the war in Iraq. Well, neither Bush nor Rumsfeld appear to remember what this quote (as originally given) really means: when von Moltke said “No plan survives contact with the enemy”, he meant that operational rigidity will be the death of your campaign.
You see, von Moltke realized that the very nature of warfare guarantees that you cannot count on things going as planned. There is no “Hoyle’s Rules for Warfare” that states how the enemy must respond to your attack. This is not chess with its formalized moves nor is it go, with its stylized strategy.
This is infantry warfare, unchanged in its basic principles since the late 19th century: kill the enemy before he kills you. Hold the ground you take. Kill the enemy if he tries to retake your captured territory. In Patton’s words, don’t die for your country; make some dumb bastard die for his country.
The ‘quaint’ rules of the Geneva Accords were arrived at because of these simple and brutal truths of modern land warfare. Those are the only rules one can expect on the battlefield – everything else must revolve around operational discipline and flexibility. The enemy will not fight according to your plan. He never has; he never will.
Yet Rumsfeld has been so enamored of his “Transformation” process that he refused to listen to the advice of his generals in planning the ground war. He has refused to modify his tactics in the face of unexpected enemy tactics. He has refused to modify his plan in the face of evidence that it is not working. He is holding to his plan, even though the enemy isn’t behaving the way the plan says they should.
Rumsfeld has forgotten or deliberately ignored the truths of von Moltke’s words, and our military is paying for it. With their lives.
And our country is going to keep paying for it long after Bush and Rumsfeld are out of office.
And Iraq is going to pay for it with usury-level compound interest.
(Note: Blogger’s photo upload chokes on this image, so I’ve hot-linked to the original site where it was found – the image is from Ft. Stewart, GA, and the April 2003 memorial service that the 3d Infantry Division (Mechanized) held. I’ll edit the photo later and see if changing the size or compression helps.)
Posted by protected static as politics at 8:50 AM UTC
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It was a w00t kind of day for me – pure, unadulterated, happy, geeky w00t dances all ’round.
Why? I hear you ask with bated breath… (Okay, I don’t hear you asking this at all, but dammit, it’s my blog and I’ll post what I friggin’ want to. So there.) I won’t prolong your agony of anticipation any longer: 2 software releases.
([Whaa!?] Yeah, whatever. As if you couldn’t guess that a post titled ‘w00t!’ wouldn’t be geeky…)
First, Red Hat just released the latest version of their flavor of desktop Linux, Fedora Core 5. Who cares, right? Well, it’s one of the first major Linux distros to include Mono pre-loaded.
I know – more ‘who cares?’. Screw all y’all – finish up your 2 drink minimum and get the hell out. But for those of you who’re sticking around, Mono’s importance is this: Mono is a multi-platform port of Microsoft’s .NET environment. .NET is the core of Microsoft’s current generation of development tools – in theory, because Mono has been coded to the standard Microsoft submitted to ECMA, pure .NET code should be relatively easy to port from OS to OS. Windows, OS X, Solaris, Unix, Linux: Mono installs on all of them and provides a consistent Application Programming Interface (API) against which to write programs. Unlike Java, where individual Java Virtual Machines for different operating systems might or might not have support for various features, Mono defines a core set of APIs that will always be present once Mono is installed.
Trust me – this could be a Very Cool Thing. Yeah, yeah, SUSE was first to include Mono in their desktop distro, but a.) Novell owns both SUSE and Mono (and you’d expect them to eat their own dogfood) and b.) IIRC, more people use Fedora than SUSE, so I’m a lot more excited about Red Hat. Their decision to include Mono is an acknowlegement that Mono is a mature and stable product. That was w00t dance #1.
w00t dance #2 actually came from the Beast of Redmond (yeah, I can hear the Open Source geeks leaving now – don’t forget to tip the waitstaff on the way out, ‘kay?). During today’s sessions at the Game Developer’s Conference 06 (GDC06), Microsoft began to roll out parts of their new XNA platform. XNA is a game development toolkit that should go a long way towards unifying and streamlining Xbox 360 and PC game development. It will also extend the .NET API to more readily perform common game-related tasks, as well as allow for a specialized version of the .NET environment to run on the Xbox 360. All this is cool in a (for me) geeky but abstract way – what really got me going, though, was the release of the XNA Build toolset.
Games require lots of media, right? Images, video, sound, textures – lots and lots of media. Managing this media gets more and more cumbersome the further into a game’s dev cycle you get – and many times, problems with the media content aren’t discovered until late into the cycle. To this end, many game companies have rolled their own ‘asset pipeline’ tools – think version control mixed with content management, and you’ll have a broad idea about what’s involved. This weekend, I bought (and read) Ben Carter’s The Game Asset Pipeline – on the one hand, I learned that there’s a lot I don’t know about developing games… But more importantly, I learned that there are, like, actually tools and methodologies out there for dealing with game assets. Going into the book, I had a hunch that many of the problems faced by our dev team with our media-rich software were not unheard of – and I was right. Asset management is one of the weak points in our development process right now, and Carter’s book laid out both the scope of the problem as well as ways to address it.
And then Microsoft stepped in today with XNA Build – an asset manager built on the .NET platform, designed to be integrated into Visual Studio.
Guess what’s installing on my laptop right now?
w00t!
Posted by protected static as geek at 9:02 PM UTC
6 Comments »
While driving to the destination of today’s Fresh Air Outing, Compulsory, The Boy asked me to put on some music.
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know; something you like.”
Hm… Opportunity knocks. Emboldened by my earlier successes, I figured this might be a great time to see where the limits of The Boy’s musical perimiters were. Time for reconaissance by fire, dropping artillery about a general area until a you discover something interesting. I figured that as long as we were probing, we might as well go long – Einstürzende Neubauten, it was!
“Whaddaya think?”
“Too strange.”
Whoops… Jeez – and I even started off with Feurio! instead of Prolog. Oh well. Next up? Richard Hell and the Voidoids!
“Whaddaya think? Too strange?”
“No, I like it – turn it up.”
Hah! Fire for effect!
Next outing I’m thinking maybe some Joy Division… or maybe The Clash… or perhaps…
Posted by protected static as random at 6:13 PM UTC
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No more mass graves, no more torture. Remember those promises we made in – what was it? April? May of 2003? Probaby around the time that the “Mission Accomplished” banner was unfurled?
So what the fuck is this?
[...] an elite Special Operations forces unit took one of Saddam Hussein’s former torture centers near Baghdad Airport and made it their own. They called it the Black Room.
“In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball,” the reporters relate. “Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq’s most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.
But wait – this is but the merest of prologues.
“The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away.
“Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, ‘NO BLOOD, NO FOUL.’ The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: ‘If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.’ According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. ‘The reality is, there were no rules there,’ another Pentagon official said.
“…no rules there”.
So – anyone tried to track down that “Democracy! Whisky! Sexy!” guy to find out what he thinks now? Not so much ‘democracy’ or ‘whisky’ under the mullahs, eh? And as for ’sexy’ – well, unless your idea of sexy crosses way past the line of ’safe, sane & consensual’ and heads on into ‘rape, torture and mutilation gives me a woody’, this probaby isn’t it.
Posted by protected static as politics at 11:20 PM UTC
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So the other day, I was driving down by the UW Surplus building and saw that they had an auction coming up this weekend. Being the pack rat that I am (and I loves me some good, cheap tools), I had to take a look and see what they were offering…
There’re some interesting-looking lots of hand tools – and computers by the shrink-wrapped pallet (PC and Mac… and even some Sun stations tossed in) – but the best item by far (just in sheer “WTF?” terms) has to be this: a USAF 16-man Altitude Chamber, complete w/ vacuum pump.
I don’t know how often UW expires their auction-related links, so should the above come up with the screamin’ 404, video of the device in action can be found here, under “Ballute Vacuum Inflation Testing” – QuickTime MOV or Windows Media WMV.
Now that’s a white elephant! ;-)
Posted by protected static as geek, random at 7:46 AM UTC
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Brian Dunbar, over at Space4Commerce, passed along an excerpt from a piece that discussed the motivations for space travel, as well as comparing and contrasting the pros and cons of manned vs. robotic space exploration. The piece he linked to touched upon a number of topics I’ve been meaning to expound upon but haven’t quite managed, so when the comment I was typing on Space4Commerce started to become post-length… well… I decided to actually get my act together and, well, post something.
Throughout history, the biggest motivators for mass migrations has been what can crudely be described as economic. There’s some magic tipping point where the perceived risk and the actual cost of leaving everything behind and starting over is lower than the ‘cost’ of staying behind. Rarely is it for ideological or moral reasons – that may be the rhetoric used to encourage people, but behind it all tends to be an economic (if not ouright profit) motive. Someone, somewhere, is expecting to make a profit on the venture – and that profit is what has largely been missing from our current system of space exploration. Financial exposure must be somewhat limited and the promise of profit must be at least somewhat realistic in order to make investing in such a venture tempting – and in the case of the people who would actually make such a voyage and be the pioneers, the cost of participating must be relatively low and the risks of participting must be seen as being lower than the risks of staying put.
In the case of European and Asian migrations to the US, shipping was streamlined to the point where steerage was within reach of many of the poorest of Europe’s citizens – around the same time, the American West was more or less pacified, and so the costs of mass expansion Westward were lowered for the people who were already firmly established in the Eastern urban areas. That lower cost, those lower barriers – they contribute to the decreased sense of risk on the part of those making the voyage and make it far more likely that someone who wants to go will do so.
So where does the space elevator come into this? Well, to torture my metaphors a while longer, I see the effort to build the elevator as the 21st century version of building schooners or clipper ships – while current manned spacecraft efforts are, to keep with the Gilded Age theme, more akin to building wooden racing yachts, like the one for which the America’s Cup was named. Sure, you can circumnavigate the globe or move people with a 40m yacht, but the cost is prohibitive… Now the schooner – that can move stuff. And people. In bulk. And in comfort even, if you so desire.
The elevator may not even need to be a clipper ship to have a major impact upon creating that tipping point – the elevator could be the proverbial ’slow boat to China’. Those boats may have been slow – but they were responsible for moving tons upon tons of commerce as well as immigrants. One-hundred-fifty years or so ago, these boats were an engine of commerce, of society, of innovation. Their existence reduced barriers – barriers to trade, to innovation, to emigration. A space elevator has, in my opinion, the potential to serve the same role today: a reducer of barriers, a force multiplier, an opportunity engine.
This is not to say that current space technology should be abandoned, nor is it to take sides in the robots vs. man debate. Rather, I would simply like to point out that a lot of what counts against manned space flight is, frankly, the cost – and that the mindshift from producing yachts to producing clipper ships or schooners (or even steamships) could go a long way towards lowering that expense. And lowering expense could be a major step towards reducing the perception of risk associated with getting people into space on a much larger scale than we’ve seen to date.
And that could lead to a whole new Age of Exploration, and possibly even some healthy and productive international competition… And both of those strike me as having the potential to be Really Good Things.
Posted by protected static as geek at 10:19 PM UTC
8 Comments »
A month or so ago, Brian Dunbar observed in my comments that y’all should patent aerobraking and then collect royalties. I’m telling you, the time is ripe for such a move!
Why?
Because IBM was just granted a patent (7,003,497) for (ready? sitting down?) confirming an electronic transaction with an email.
Breathtaking in its stupidity simplicity, isn’t it? Think of the advantages – you’d have complete financial freedom, and you wouldn’t ever be beholden to VC-weasel-suit-types (I’ve heard the horror stories). Just remember – package it as a business process, and USPTO should go for it like… like… Congressmen for a lobbyist’s junket!
Oh yeah – I’ll want a modest slice if you pull it off… A finder’s fee of sorts. Coz’ I’m nice that way.
It can even be a one-time fee instead of a percentage. Coz’ I’m nice that way.
[via SIVACRACY]
Posted by protected static as geek at 11:44 AM UTC
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My friend Kristina has posted some photos of the Nasca drawings taken during her recent trip to Peru.
We hate her. We’re glad she’s back safe and sound.
And no… I’m not the slightest bit jealous.
Posted by protected static as random at 10:47 PM UTC
4 Comments »
…borrow a move from the culture war playbook. Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton & Dick Durbin want the CDC to study the latest public health menace – video games:
Long time foes of the video game industry persuade Senate committee to approve a sweeping study of the “impact of electronic media use” to be organized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC.
Because, as we all know, the CDC has nothing better to worry about – and as one of the (alas, all too rare) lucid posters on gamedev.net observed, it’ll be about as well spent as the $100 million spent on evaluating the power of prayer over medical outcomes.
And if anyone was wondering why I don’t trust the DLC and their ilk, just take a look at the cosponsors of the bill.
Posted by protected static as geek at 10:03 PM UTC
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Normally, I can’t stand CIO Magazine – okay, that’s not entirely fair; I find it interesting to see industry trends and who’s pushing what agenda, but I have very little tolerance for buzzwords and weasel-speak… And IMAO, the ratio of ads to weasel-speak runs fairly high. Not as high as some of the free trade rags, but still… Let’s just say that I read it with a box of Diamond Kosher salt close at hand.
So when I was reading the current dead-tree issue (not online yet), I was surprised by how strongly “What Can Tear Us Apart” by Juan Enriquez resonated with me. Enriquez points out a number of factors that have the potential to, as he phrases it, create an “Untied States of America”, a confederation (if we’re lucky) instead of a federation. Yes, Enriquez has a vested interest in avoiding the scenario he portrays – his company, after all, is a venture firm specializing in biotech – but I think his thesis bears closer examination.
Enriquez points out that throughout the world, increased disparities between regional economies has led to increased demands for regional autonomy. He points out that much of the US economy is increasingly driven by fewer zip codes – and those zip codes are largely in metro urban areas in the ‘blue’ states. This is somewhat simplistic, but really – even in the ‘red’ states, the economic centers tend to be urban. These economic engines also tend to be on the purple side of things, in contrast to the deep-red exurbs and rural areas around them.
Of course, life isn’t as simple as the blue-red dichotomy that makes for good media stories and good political theatre… But that political theatre is driving policy decisions that will have an impact upon our economy. The strain of politics that has come to dominate the ‘red’ states is increasingly incompatible with the economic realities of the ‘blue’ states – feeding into such internet phenomena as the “Fuck the South” essay or the “United States of Jesusland” JPGs that circulated far and wide in the wake of the 2004 elections. Even within ‘blue’ states, there are active ‘red’ constituencies that seek to differentiate and distance themselves from ‘those people’ in the cities – hell, read the letters to the editor in Seattle’s two daily papers, and you’d think that we had Berkely vs. Alabama within a 40 mile radius. And in many respects, we do: it’s all right-wing-bigot-this vs. stupid-commie-liberal-that.
Enriquez’s article ties directly into the two pieces I wrote yesterday (part 1, part 2) – this insistence upon the subjugation of science (and here I’m using ’science’ as broadly as possible – education, technology, research) to ideological ends will only exacerbate these existing tensions. The “Fuck the South” essays will multiply – and “Fuck the North” essays will arise in response.
And last time that happened, it wasn’t pretty… The seeds of the Civil War were sown at various points in our nation’s history – some a century earlier, some but a few decades. It takes a while for such seeds to bear fruit, but when they do, stand back; the harvest is be a bloody one.
coda: Yes, the title’s from Matthew 7:24-27, houses built upon rock and sand and all that… I’m not one for Bible verses, being the unbeliever that I am, but I do appreciate good metaphors and turns of phrase.
Posted by protected static as geek at 12:29 PM UTC
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