By
lani
18 Mar 2002
i checked my messages at 6pm on Saturday night, and there was Amy Hare’s voice saying something through the static about going down to Richmond and passing through DC for dinner. By 8pm, i came in from smoking to find Cheryl (Amy’s best friend from Jersey now at VCU) in my bathroom. Ethiopian food, lost hamster, and an invitation.
<p>And then I was in Richmond, lighting another cigarette. Sunday morning we went to 821 for brunch. And Stu (Cupid’s—yes, that’s her given name—roommate) told us that he was participating in a smoking survey! oh my god! welcome to tobacco country! everytime they call they send him two packs of unmarked cigarettes. he smokes them and hands in a survey. he let me try a few. i found them to be light yet hearty with a hint of extra additives. Stu thinks that they got his name from the Camel Reps who come into clubs and hand you a pack of Camels and a pack of whatever you smoke. what! there are no cigarette fairies in my world! maybe I should move to Richmond.</p>
<p>then we rented a couple videos and drank irish beer and wine coolers. We saw Down by Law and Fishing With John Part I, which have three things in common: Tom Waits, Jim Jarmusch, and John Lurie. </p>
<p>“There’s nothing like waking up in the morning with a rod in your hand.” </p>
By
anders pearson
15 Mar 2002
after reading a few intriguing reviews last week, i decided to give Sorcerer Linux a try. the thought of a distribution that was completely compiled from source on my own machine and had the ability to automatically keep all the software installed completely up-to-date was more than enough to make me drool.
so last friday night, i backed up all my data and made careful notes of my hardware configuration. on saturday i went to download the ISO image for the install cd from what was the current site at the time, sorcerer.wox.org. instead of the page i’d seen before, i was redirected to the lunar penguin site. there had been mention in a few of the reviews that Kyle Sallee, the main developer of Sorcerer was getting a job and wouldn’t be able to continue working on it. from what i could glean from a quick look at the lunar penguin site, it looked like kyle had finally given up and abandoned sorcerer and lunar penguin had taken its place. i decided to hold off on installing just to let things settle down a bit.
so i installed Debian instead, spent a few days trying unsuccessfully to get networking working, gave up on debian and reinstalled mandrake. all the while i read through the Sorcerer mail archives trying to figure out what had happened and what direction things were moving in.
what i found was absolutely fascinating. it was a little more complex than just being kyle running out of time and energy to work on the project. while none deny that kyle is a fantastically talented coder who did some great work, there were apparently some personality conflicts. he would consistently reject patches that others contributed. in general it looked like he only wanted contributors who would do exactly what he told them and who would do all the grunt work for him. but he would refuse any contributions that came with input on the direction of the project. all this time, he was loudly complaining that if people didn’t start helping him (on his terms only) SGL development would have to stop.
naturally, flame-wars ensued on the mailing list, egos were damaged, tempers flared, and kyle became less and less coherent. some of the other developers, who were largely interested in having periodic “stable” releases forked the code and created the lunar penguin distro. around saturday, something in kyle snapped and he took down the sorcerer web site, replacing it with a redirect to the lunar penguin site. from this and some comments he made to other people, it appeared that he was stepping down from SGL and was endorsing LP.
meanwhile, the rest of the sorcerer developers, free from kyle’s restraints got busy picking up the pieces, reorganizing and getting things going again. they put together a new website and got back to work on the code.
but things got weirder. the original SGL website changed from redirecting to LP to an almost surreal manifesto. unsigned and written in the third person, attacking the LP team and the SGL developers alike and making vague, questionable legal threats. no one seems to have heard directly from kyle since it appeared. he hasn’t come forward to either confirm or deny that he wrote and posted the diatribe or to answer any of the many rebuttals to it.
after following this whole saga i figured that at the very least i should install sorcerer just to make sure it was worth the time and energy i was putting into researching it. the amount of activity and the speed with which the SGL developers recovered the project after kyle pretty much deliberately tried to kill it assures me that SGL isn’t going to be abandoned anytime soon. technically, i have yet to hear any criticisms of it beyond bug reports on some weird configurations.
so i downloaded and installed. i started wednesday night and, because i hadn’t RTFM’d carefully enough, i screwed some stuff up and couldn’t get it to boot without a rescue disk. it took about 5 minutes on irc yesterday to find someone who knew how to fix it to help me out. when i went home last night i made the change and everything started working flawlessly again. i got networking up without a hitch, updated the system, rebuilt it so the binaries of the minimal system that came on the install CD were replaced with freshly compiled and optimized ones. compiling is slow so that took pretty much all night. i started xfree86 compiling before i left for work this morning; i expect that it’s still going as i write this. i’ll still have to compile gnome and kde before i have a whole desktop machine again but already i’m impressed with how smoothly things have gone.
when you go to compile an app, sorcery automatically figures out all of its dependencies, downloads those and compiles them. i’m not really done yet but so far i’m definately impressed with sorcerer. with some UI work on the installer and better documentation i think sorcerer has what it takes to be a major distribution. being highly optimized, configurable and constantly updated should make it the distro that all the “cool” geeks are running within a year or two. of course, since the install takes so long and you need to know a lot about linux just to get it working, we’ll probably still be handing out redhat or mandrake CDs to newbies.
By
anders pearson
14 Mar 2002
since digitally i sign every email i send, and i have to type in my GPG passphrase every time, i’ve typed that passphrase many, many times over the last couple years.
<p>nevertheless, i still have the occasional day like today when, for some reason, the connection from my brain to my hands is scrambled and for the life of me, i can’t type it in correctly. </p>
<p>it mystifies me. i’m sure i’ve gone for weeks at a time without mistyping it a single time but some days i screw it up every time i type it unless i consciously slow way down and enter it very carefully and deliberately.</p>
<p>the odd thing is that i can still type other stuff normally. it’s just that one passphrase that’s been hardcoded into my neural pathways that gets screwed up.</p>
By
anders pearson
13 Mar 2002
as much as i like to slag on the big media conglomerates like aol/time/warner, i have to hand it to mtv: the osbournes is one of the funniest shows on tv. i really watch very little tv, so that’s probably not saying much coming from me.
<p>omar and allison (my roommates from the summer) came over tonight and we had 40’s and watched the Osbournes. it’s only the second show of the season but i find myself really enjoying it. honestly, i feel a little guilty that i actually like something mtv has produced. i feel dirty.</p>
<p>i think what i find most amusing is that of the entire family, ozzy is really just an innocent bystander. compared to the rest of them, he’s the sane one. </p>
<p>the only *bleep*ing problem i have with the *bleep*ing show is that *bleep*ing everyone in the *bleep*ing family *bleep*ing swears so *bleep*ing much that you *bleep*ing can’t *bleep*ing make a *bleep*ing word out. but it’s still *bleep*ing funny.</p>
By
tuck
12 Mar 2002
ive recently begun to realize that learning a foreign language is another area of brain saturation where chunking (alla Douglas R. Hofstadter) seems to be the best way of obtaining proficiency. you could learn the meaning of each and every word and then try to fit them together in descriptive ways which you feel best portray the message you are trying to transmit, however, unless you already know the typical patterns in which these words and the resultant phrases are used and understood by the listeners youll encounter, these literal word-meaning-organizations and the descriptive phrases you create may be either misunderstood or completely un-understood due the reigning power of linguistic conventionalism.
<p>the following rant will make people agitated with me. i accept this before hand hehe. </p>
<p>at this point it seems much easier to stop trying to express myself through the preferred word-meaning-based attempts ive made in chinese (which are grammatically correct, just to mention) and instead simply repeat the various phrases ive heard used around me. i dont speak another language as well as i speak and write in english, so there is a good chance this is just ignorance, but it <b>seems </b> like if you deviate from priorly constructed phrases in chinese, even if your deviation is made with words which, as individuals, hold the right meaning, and even if they are placed in a grammatically correct pattern, it is still wrong. however, im certain that if they thought about the words chosen before considering their usage mistaken by way of novel creation, theyd understand what you were saying. </p>
<p>increasingly, it seems as though fluency here is merely an ability to say what everyone else says in the exact same way that they say it. if i ask a chinese person a question in chinese, for example, i can pretty much guess in 5-6 tries what the answer will be. now, if i was merely talking about guessing the meaning of their response, or the topic or whatever, then that would be understandable. there are only so many answers to certain questions. but what im saying here is that it is not topic-based accuracy, but word-for-word with few exeptions. unfortunately, its not resultant of attempts to simplify things for me because im a foreigner. ill be damned if i dont hear the same sorts of identical comments/questions/answers/point-outs etc. in verbal correspondence all around me all the time. whats more disturbing is that even when the response given by the chinese-answerer to the chinese-asker is one of the set word-for-word choices, the asker still gasps in surprise as if the response was all original. its like everyone may as well just pick a number which represents one of the set verbal correspondence patterns that are allowed to be used. It would save lots of time… thus a dialogue could follow as such:</p>
<p>26.</p>
<p>79! (actually, use of the ! would probably be part of the code 79 already…)</p>
<p>03.</p>
<p>44.</p>
<p>46. (end.)</p>
<p>maybe i should just memorize 400 chinese phrases instead of lists of words. chunking the words like this would also erase the odd little pauses or unconventional stresses that the foreign student of any foreign language inevitably must reckon with. instead of taking the time to form sentences which could possibly be misunderstoodingly (hehe) original, ill just pick and choose the nearest-in-meaning accepted phrase and make everyone here happy.</p>
<p>they often say that words in Japanese or Chinese have no translation or have no english equivalent because they are so profound and beautiful- which they are. but id like to point out that in english, my evolving native language, the creative constructionism through the poetic license granted to all english speakers of able mind and vocabulary is rawly unlimited. i agree that written Altaic (sp?)or chinese language has had great creative-author jurisdiction. but the spoken word is largely bound by laws of speech which is cause for much frowning if ever violated. in both asiatic languages in which i now have some experience (Chinese being the better of the two by far) im gaining confidence in my thinking that there are culturally-spawned linguistic inhibitions which set definitive boundaries in the usage of understood words. in both cultures, it seems as though their whole verbal interaction with anyone concerning anything not deeply personal could be split up into about 400 phrases and/or particular sounds which carry either genuine or (as is often the case) faked emotive response. (im exaggerating only mildly.) i mean, even the very noises made seem to be under some sort of control… some sort of learned natural response. but in english, however, there is a spoken-word stylistic freedom . for one thing, it seems as though the creative power of written word is given due power verbally as well. it seems like people take apart what you say, if interested, and often make sense of it despite its occasional novelty and occassionally actually appreciate your descriptive efforts. for another thing, people-noises are amazingly diverse in america. a sigh from one guy is <span class="caps">NOT</span> required to sound the same from another. a sigh is a sigh. its like a yawn. its physiological… a dispelling of air, a relaxation of the diaphram. but over here, it seems that there are only a few allowable kinds of sighs, or gasps of surprise or whatever. i find this very weird.</p>
<p>to explain how im feeling, if asked, i have to say what Wang said when he felt kind of this way, who had to say what Lei felt when she felt kind of this way etc. i cant use more precise adjectives- you know, the emotive ones, because emotional-sensorial adjectives here seem restricted to either ones that have already been declared allowable to be used in a more general way (which means they are used all the time to mean many different things which of course devalues their specific meaning for why i would use them), or that are limited to describing certain things only and can never be moved around. </p>
<p>i realize that this seeming is most likely resultant of my lack of fluency. but until i lock on to whatever these rules i keep violating are, for simplicity and convenience and efficiency, i guess ill stick to the phrases ive encountered and forgo these attempts at trying to answer in a voice which is actually mine instead of merely using standards to represent me. i know the chinese teacher would probably live longer without the 160/90 blood pressure i seem to give her. </p>
<p>(practically laying in wait for kam to give me a lashing here hehe)</p>
<p>(or jp)</p>
<p>(or anders)</p>
<p>(or anyone.) </p>
<p>(actually, i know im just being foolish with this rant. but thus is the tucker-state of dejection at the hands of ms. chinese teacher. which occured about 12 minutes ago. i havent healed yet. )</p>
<p>two grunts, head lowered, back to the cave. </p>
<p>try again tomorrow.</p>
By
lani
11 Mar 2002
I don’t know too much about him or what is involved in his art, which is is why I plan on going to hear him lecture at the National Academy of Science next week.
<p>I was reminded of my plans, while viewing the “Corot to Picasso” exibit at the Phillips Gallery with my old friend Ana. I also started thinking about a book I saw in Bridge Street Books on Saturday called “Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc</p>
<p>,” by Arthur Miller. <a href="http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-54/iss-12/p49.html">“Arthur Miller addresses an important question: What was the connection, if any, between the simultaneous appearance of modern physics and modern art at the beginning of the 20th century?”</a></p>
<p>and ok, so i haven’t gotten through <span class="caps">GEB</span> yet…yet, but it has me wondering about science/art and social shift. i think about heller’s work and i wonder what the next step will be or if it has already happened. or whether there will be a “step” at all?</p>
By
anders pearson
10 Mar 2002
hanging out at the bar tonight with obert, julintip and her friends i had an interesting little idea.
<p>suppose everyone had a tiny portable electronic device on them that stored their musical preferences and had short range wireless capabilities. then, if you had a jukebox that could detect and talk to those devices, it could tailor its playlist to roughly match the musical tastes of the people in the immediate vicinity.</p>
<p>i think it would be really nice. sort of an automated, telepathic dj. you could extend the idea to other places that play music: bars, clubs, even replace the muzak in elevators. i think it would be great if i stepped into an elevator alone and the barry manilow that was playing was quickly replaced with some good, heavy industrial or something.</p>
<p>of course, the main problem with this idea is the chicken and egg problem. if no one has the devices, it wouldn’t make sense to have the jukeboxes around and vice versa. so i’d suggest initially putting the technology into cellphones. enough people have cellphones already and always carry them with them that it would help bootstrap the system.</p>
<p>sprint (i think it’s sprint) has a service where you can hold your phone up to some music playing, dial the right number and it will tell you the artist and song that you’re listening to. if you combined this idea with a “i really like this song” and “i really don’t like this song” buttons on the phone, people could easily train it to their musical tastes. add in some data-mining like amazon uses to tell you that people who bought book X also frequently bought book Y and the system could train itself even better <em>and</em> alert you to new stuff that you might like by talking to the other devices it comes in contact with. if you’re in a room with someone who likes a lot of the same music as you, it could automatically add some of their preferences to your system.</p>
<p>you could also get CD players and various home stereo equipment that talk to your device and tell it that since you listen to a particular CD a lot, you probably like that album.</p>
<p>since i’m really into wearables and ubiquitous computing, i also think it would be need to add some contextual awareness. maybe if the device had a way to read your pulse/blood pressure/skin conductance/etc, it could tell what kind of mood you’re in and learn to associate particular groups of songs with particular moods. if you’re driving in your car, it could play good driving music for you; if you’re working on the computer, it could play whatever you like to listen to while you work; if you’re just chilling out and reading a book, it could play more mellow background sort of music.</p>
<p>probably not feasible at the moment but as cellphones and <span class="caps">PDA</span>s get smaller, more powerful, more widespread, and with more wireless capabilities, i think it could work quite nicely.</p>
<p>so if you like the idea, please desseminate it so that if in ten years, some company tries to patent the technology, there will be a lot of prior art to fight them with.</p>
By
anders pearson
09 Mar 2002
gaah!
<p>i’d set aside the weekend to install <a href="http://www.distrowatch.com/sorcerer.php">Sorcerer <span class="caps">GNU</span>/Linux</a> on my computer. the combination of having a highly optimized distro custom compiled for my machine and the claims of seamless upgrades had me drooling. i’d wanted to do a <a href="http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/">linux from scratch</a> install for quite a while but i know how tedious the endless “./configure; make; make install” process can get. <span class="caps">SGL</span> seems to offer all the benefits but with a more streamlined process.</p>
<p>so last night i printed out and read all the documentation, made careful notes about all my hardware and configuration stuff and backed everything up. this morning i go to download the latest iso images for the install cd and find that the sorcerer website was now redirecting to <a href="http://www.lunar-penguin.com/">lunar-penguin</a>. upon further investigation, it appears that <span class="caps">SGL</span>’s man developer has run out of time and energy and given up on the project. lunar penguin is one of several parallel projects by some of the other developers trying to reorganize and continue with the project.</p>
<p>at any rate, <span class="caps">SGL</span>/lunar-penguin is in a state of flux at the moment so i think i’ll hold off on installing. i plan on watching the mailing list and websites for the next couple weeks and trying again when it stabilizes (or at least when lunar penguin gets a better name).</p>
<p>but i got myself all worked up to spend the weekend playing with a totally new installation so i’ve got to do <em>something</em>. i’m thinking maybe i’ll check out the newest debian release and then maybe play with some of the dangerous low-latency kernel patches…</p>
By
lani
06 Mar 2002
my sister’s boyfriend left TurboGo on my mom’s computer as a gift, and i finally visited the site. i was happy to find the download, tutorials, history, etc. i figured it would be a good idea to start with a program, because finding a)go players and b)someone i’m comfortable with has been difficult. somebody told me you could play online too, but i’m afraid.
<p>part “b)” is a funny lani-ism (although maybe other people share it?). i really don’t like competitive games. i didn’t like chess or scrabble. (my father made us play.) and i never really got into debate, even though i kept going. </p>
<p>i like Go, though. i like the lack of heirarchy. the simple rules, but the complex nature. i like what you learn from and about your partner. and it’s weird, but i can only really play with lovers and would-be lovers. i’ve tried to play with other people, but it hasn’t worked out. i often make the comparison to <a href="http://inkpot.com/film/pillowbook.html"> “The Pillowbook”</a>, when i try to explain it to other people. </p>
<p>amy hare thinks i shouldn’t change a thing, that it belongs to the sacrosanct world of “quirk”. but what if i never play go again. i think it’s silly of me, but i haven’t succeeded in driving it into exile yet. so TurboGo, here we go…</p>
By
emile
05 Mar 2002
does anyone here use audiogalaxy to preview music before you buy it? i found an interesting “feature” a few days ago. if you have someone’s UID you can essentially log into their account.
audiogalaxy is two seperate components: a web interface through which searches are performed and downloads controlled, and a satallite application, which handles the file transfers and indexing of your local collection. with the right url, containing a person’s UID, you can download files onto their computer and play them. i believe that it onlf supports the transfer of mp3 files, so currently the only potential is that to annoy the heck out of audiogalaxy users by blaring yoko ono mp3s on their computers at 4am, or potentially fill their harddrive with random music. does anyone know of a potential malicious application? are there mp3 virii?