By
anders pearson
21 May 2003
i’ll be in boston next week for the <a href=”http://www.oscom.org/Conferences/Cambridge/“>Open Source Content Management Conference</a>. it looks like a pretty impressive <a href=”http://www.oscom.org/Conferences/Cambridge/Program/“>program</a> for the price. if you live in the area and want to get together for dinner or drinks, let me know. i should be there from wednesday through the weekend.
while i’m in boston, i also plan on attending the <a href=”http://www.prickmusic.com/“>Prick</a> concert on thursday night (yes, Prick is back. they have a new album that they are only selling on their website. do your part to support artists who work outside the record industry and buy the CD.)
By
anders pearson
15 May 2003
i’ve been working on simulation stuff lately at work and cellular automata play a fairly important role. my job has also involved trying out and evaluating a lot of different technologies and libraries related to python, simulations, and scientific computing in general. so as a side project to the main simulation work, i started developing a little toy program for playing with cellular automata. the idea is to keep it fairly simple so i can try out new libraries in it without much trouble.
when don hopkins was visiting in december, he recommended the book Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling to me for learning about CAs. it's a fantastic book but all of its examples are based on an MIT CAM-6 expansion card from the 80's that was a special piece of hardware designed to perfom CA operations. the card was controlled via Forth, which is a somewhat obtuse stack-based language. very cool, but with a very steep learning curve and quite unlike most programming languages any non-programmers are likely to have ever encountered.
so my goal for the cellular automata toy was to a certain extent to emulate the CAM-6 system but using python as the language to specify the rules in rather than Forth.
the current version i think turned out fairly well. it's relatively fast (on linux at least; windows seems to make it 3 or 4 times slower), very powerful, and pretty easy to use once you've got it figured out.
if you’re interested in Cellular Automata but don’t feel like coding up a whole framework yourself, maybe you’ll find it useful. basically, i learned Forth so you don’t have to.
By
anders pearson
12 May 2003
so lani and i escaped to maine for a few days. the official reason for our trip was to go to my aunt’s wedding in bangor on friday.
we borrowed a jetta from a coworker, which was nice because buses suck, and being under 25, renting a car is crazy expensive. having the freedom to come and go as we pleased while in maine was a new experience for me at least. i usually take the bus home and while i’m there i have to beg rides off friends and family. the downside to borrowing a car is that it’s somewhat nerve-wracking. if you get in an accident or otherwise mess up a rental car, who cares? but if you put a dent in a friend’s car, you’ve got some explaining to do.
we accomplished all of our mission goals though. to and from maine without incident. no accidents, no speeding tickets, no pedestrian fatalities. we attended the wedding, managed to visit josef (only because he managed to miss his flight) and lani’s friends at Bates, had diner food, hung out with the family in dexter, took my sister’s dog for a nice long walk, and made it back to new york with a couple cases of PBR, <a href=”http://www.shipyard.com/“>Shipyard</a>, and assorted samples of flavored vodka from the new hampshire liquor store.
our gerbils were happy to see us, though i think we left them with too much food because they seem a little chubby now.
By
Eric Mattes
09 May 2003
I just found out about this today. An unthinkably simple exploit allows anybody to change anybody else’s password to whatever they want. Microsoft found out about the problem after somebody posted it to a public message board. The FTC is considering a ridiculously large fine to punish Microsoft. See article here:
<p><a href="http://theregister.co.uk/content/6/30620.html">http://theregister.co.uk/content/6/30620.html</a></p>
<p><br />
Detailed report here:</p>
<p><a href="http://securitytracker.com/alerts/2003/May/1006728.html">http://securitytracker.com/alerts/2003/May/1006728.html</a><br />
This brings to mind the issue… MS seems to be suffering from their own popularity. I’ve heard the excuse “nobody ever got fired for choosing microsoft.” It’s true, and I think this is why they can never be dethroned. Unfortunately there are legions of hackers who have devoted themselves to exploiting flaws in MS products and punishing those who use them. So… they will always be number 1 despite the fact that they are notoriously flawed. Obviously there are flaws in competitor’s software, but nobody is trying to write viruses for those programs! It’s sad that so many people depend on MS software.<br />
MS should really hire a team of hackers to hack their software before it is released or else they will never see the end of stuff like this.<br />
By
anders pearson
04 May 2003
lani and i went to the pet store yesterday with the intention of getting a hamster. we came home with a pair of gerbils instead.
they are very intelligent, curious, and social.
they're naturally desert animals so they don't produce much urine and don't smell as much as most other rodents.
gerbils aren't fully nocturnal, so they're actually up and active some during the day.
they are insanely cute.
gerbil cons
- they are burrowing animals so they like to dig and scratch constantly
currently, we’re trying to think up good names for them (the hamster names we’d been planning, like ‘MC Hamster’, aren’t really good for gerbils). then, their training will begin. soon, the world will cower before the might of our rodent army!
in the meantime, i’ve been educating myself with help from the <a href=”http://www.gerbils.co.uk/“>National Gerbil Society</a>.
By
tuck
03 May 2003
While living in a new and foreign place, there’s a certain mysticism that shrouds the acquaintances I make. Take, for example, the woman who sweeps the dirt (off of the dirt) behind my building. If I was to attempt bringing her to America, I’m convinced that somewhere along the journey she would vanish. I visualize this happening in the same way that Marty McFly begins to fade away in BTTF. The sweeper-lady’s existence and reality is only there, behind my building; any displacement is misplacement and violates a time-and-place cosmic order. I’d even be surprised if she shows up in photos. She’d be in pictures whenever I looked, but as soon as I show someone from home, she’d be gone.
In addition to random people here, I also have difficulties imagining friends from my Beijing existence crossing over into my US life, my US world. After two years of sharing stories with Chinese pals while walking down shit-smelling, dusty, rotting-garbage roads around parts of Beijing, I’m somehow unable to imagine them someday in the passenger seat of my car in the US as we drive to a city. Again, these people belong to a segment of my reality that is non-transferable.
I remember posting on thraxil after a multi-month hiatus last year. I put up some (possibly shocking) pictures of me teaching English to a class of 6-year old Chinese children. A few months later I mentioned that I had introduced a tabletop, modified-for-purpose RPG to a high school class as a way of boosting student morale and motivation for getting into the technical grit of English grammar. It worked well; the students were less likely to err if each mistake made (per sentence) was a cost to their character (ranging from robots, to NBA stars, to Weiner dogs).
This school wasn’t one of Beijing’s 3-4 best, which means that the students are essentially doomed, regardless of aptitude, motivation or effort. For them, getting a real education or getting outside of China (if desired) is practically impossible. If they had the kind of money that would grant such freedom, they’d be at a different school. They’d already have a completely different life.
I grew somewhat fond of one student. She was incredibly free-thinking, ballsy, a little rough around the edges, underprivileged and essentially cool as hell. She was particularly keen on my stories describing expanses of clean woods, free roaming dogs, and the absence of people in my area of New Hampshire. She used to ask me questions:
“Are there animals in the woods?”
“Yes, bears.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“Only if very hungry.”
“Would they eat a person?”
“Of course.”
While playing English-Class RPG, she was always asking for huge, open space. “Is there a field over there?” “Yes.” “I go to the field and explore.”
Her teachers repeatedly told her mom that she wasn’t destined for higher education (in China, this entire judgment is made on one’s middle school math aptitude)(Reason #189 to despise China’s system)), and should begin to consider what she wanted to do with her life that wouldn’t require college. This basically amounted to a sentence of stagnation and poverty.
I don’t know exactly when the idea came to me, but at some point last year I began thinking about how much she would enjoy seeing a place like New England, and parts of New Hampshire and Maine in particular. To us, people born and raised there, the landscape is commonplace and boring. We flock to cities (usually) to escape the drab spaciousness, and to be closer to other people and things. The key dynamics of rural life in New England consists of things like seasonal changes, the very occasional new restaurant or shop to check out, and home maintenance- very attractive perks for the elderly, yes, but for anyone with energy and motivation, it can suffocate. The dynamics of city residency, however, are infinite. Each day outside is full of surprise and newness. Just walking to work is guaranteed to be somewhat interesting. But for people who’ve only known “city”, getting out in the woods can have its own thrill. For these types, driving through certain areas is like visiting a park. Actually, most of the places of which I’m thinking are just uncared-for expanses bordered by forests between Here-and-there Maine, USA. Yet they beat the hell out of most parks, especially those in developing countries like China. Not only do you have to pay to visit these state-owned greeneries, you are also nearly always forbidden to trod freely about.
I managed to broker a $17,000 scholarship for this girl, Ma Su Shan (a.k.a. Susanna) to attend my old boarding school in Kents Hill, Maine. She’ll be the first Mainland Chinese student to attend there, and hopefully not the last.
I would have given anything to see the faces of her fucking psychologically abusive teachers once her family announced her acceptance abroad. I wish I could have stormed into the classroom to yank her away and load her into a limo in front of the school while all her teachers and classmates looked on in anger and confusion. We’d flip them off as we drove away.
While many other friends and acquaintances remain locked in this Beijing reality, to my own surreal awakening (she’s crossing over!), there is new globe-trotting renegade where once there never was, or, in her environment, never could be.
It’ll be fun to take her out for weekend trips to Boston and NYC. Hopefully friends will help add to her experience as well.
Anyway, it feels good to have been a part of this. And I needed to negate some bad karma from my youth anyway.
By
emile
02 May 2003
given two near identical text files without endline characters with a differing substring of an arbitrary length and position in the latter file, is there a tool operable on a unix platform to generate a “patch file”, meaning a new file denoting which substrings to delete from the original and what to add to generate the new file, and then to later take such a diff file and apply it to the original to regenerate the edit? diff does this on a line by line basis and merge can rejoin them but i need a tool that analyses a string without endlines.
By
anders pearson
29 Apr 2003
the finally actually <a href=”http://news.com.com/2100-1028-998718.html”>charged</a> Mike Hawash (the intel engineer who’s been held in solitary confinement since march 20th). here’s a real scary bit of the article:
It also includes reports from anonymous neighbors saying that Hawash acted more "Eastern" and grew a beard after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
crap. i better go shave and burn my chinese dictionaries before i get thrown in jail for terrorism.
maybe star trek was right. remember the episode where the crew encountered their evil twins from a parallel universe? you could tell the evil spock from the good spock because the evil spock had a goatee. it must be true! facial hair is a sure sign of evil intentions.
By
anders pearson
28 Apr 2003
for their last album two years ago, british rock band <a href=”http://www.marillion.com/“>Marillion</a> asked fans to buy the album before they’d even made it. 13,000 fans did, raising 200,000 pounds to pay for the recording process. for their next album, they’re <a href=”http://www.marillion.com/news/newalbum/index.html”>doing it again</a>.
anyone who’s been following the post-napster music industry and generally thinking hard about how artists will make a living even if their music can be downloaded for free should recognize this as being (very nearly) an application of the <a href=”http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/#k4”>street performer protocol</a>.
i see the fact that marillion has managed to make this work <em>quite well</em> as a good sign that the street performer protocol is a workable and realistic model for the future.
By
anders pearson
22 Apr 2003
if you post a link to a site which has <a href=”http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mttrackback.html”>trackback</a> enabled (and includes the necessary code for trackback autodiscovery), thraxil will automatically ping it. eg, just by linking to peter’s <a href=”http://www.thegogglesdonothing.com/archives/000053.html”>lizard post</a>, it should create a trackback entry there.
the next step of course is setting thraxil up to receive trackback pings from other sites. that requires a little more work but i’ll do it eventually.