By anders pearson 06 Feb 2002
ah…
<p>picked up a cheap 60GB hard-drive today to augment the nearly full 9GB i’ve had in my computer for the last few years. i figure that with 60GB i can keep about 1000 albums worth of mp3s archived. i love technology :)</p> By lani 06 Feb 2002
I recently watched “Hero” (1997) with Takeshi Kaneshiro. I thought it was a good movie, full of style montages that i find frequently in HK or Japanese films that i enjoy (“The Most Terrible Time of My Life” (jpn – again with Takeshi and Triad), “2000 AD” (HK)). Judging from the costumes, it seemed like it was set in the 30’s or 40’s…after Shanghai was leased to the British anyway, but much like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” it would be hard to categorize it as a period piece due to certain modernisms. in some ways i think of it as non-linear plot progression. or the recognition of films styles/cliches set against eachother, similar to eisensteins montage of images, to create an effect that is often humorous.
<p>anyway, it was a good movie. i laughed, i cried, i shook my hands at the screen, and then at myself for being led so effectively.</p> By anders pearson 05 Feb 2002
i love open-source software. have i mentioned that lately?
<p>i’ve been experimenting with different email clients lately and finally found one that does everything i need it to: <span class="caps">GPG</span> integration, decent <span class="caps">IMAP</span> support, no html support (i hate html email) and the ability to remap the keybindings so i can make it behave exactly like pine (i’ve been using pine from the shell on the mailserver for years but the connection between my cable-modem provider and columbia’s network is spotty enough that typing over that connection has gotten annoyingly slow) which my fingers know mechanically.</p>
<p>after trying and discarding for one reason or another kmail, evolution, balsa, and schemes involving fetchmail with pine or mutt on a local machine, i tried <a href="http://www.tkrat.org/">TkRat</a>. it handles everything i need it too and is extremely lightweight to boot. it’s written in <span class="caps">TCL</span> using the Tk widget library so it doesn’t <em>look</em> very pretty but it’s quite functional. </p>
<p>after using it for a couple days, the only problem i had with it was that it has these huge tooltips for pretty much every part and no option to turn them off. the tooltips are nice for about the first hour you’re using it and figuring out where all the features live but gets annoying after that. it gets to the point where you have to make sure to move the mouse out of the window all the time to keep what you’re reading or typing from being obscured by some huge tooltip explaining in depth that the “send” button is used to “send” the email or something retarded like that.</p>
<p>luckily, because TkRat is open-source, i was able to do a quick grep through its source code, find the function that shows tooltips, or “balloon help” as they refer to it (called ‘rat_balloon::Show’) and add a ‘return’ to the function before it actually shows anything on the screen, essentially nullifying the tooltip functionality. i don’t even know <span class="caps">TCL</span> but i was able to do this entire operation in about a minute, making the program immensely more usable to me. </p>
<p>with closed-source software, you’re stuck with whatever microsoft or adobe or whoever decides to give you.</p>
<p>if i get ambitious enough to learn some <span class="caps">TCL</span> basics i’ll add a preferences option for tooltips and contribute the patch back to the project so other people can benefit from it.</p> By tuck 04 Feb 2002
i went to Tang Ren Teng (or is it Teng Ren Tang…) over the weekend which is the most well known traditional chinese medicine shop in china. it was kind of a super mall for powders and leaves and other smelly things. after examining all the bottles of drinkable alcohol tonic containing wormies and little coily snakies (and mother effin’ big coily snakies) deer penises (don’t you just want to say “peni” for the plural?) i came the the “root area.” the ginseng roots that by mystical guidance (or pure chance as we say in the west) have a humanoid shape, meaning two little sprouts for arms and longer ones for legs coming off of a trunkish looking trunk, despite the fact that they are the same size and weight as the other roots, take the price from a couple hundred RMB to 35,000RMB. They all looked kind of like Gumby. there was one root that looked really, amazingly like Gumby which was 280,000RMB (divide by 8 for US$.)
<p>for some stupid, stupid, stupid reason. </p>
<p>actually, maybe the Ginseng Gumby i’d pay more for… but i’d just want to have it around to show off. i could never make a tea out of Ginseng Gumby, or cut his limbs off regardless of their medicinal abilities. it’s Ginseng Gumby you sick bastards, not some kind of food. it was hard to leave him there, all strapped down in his red velvet bed. sorry Ginseng Gumby. sorry.</p>
<p>but anyway. my thoughts now are on Ginseng Gumby. and JP. see, if i can rescue Ginseng Gumby somehow, maybe JP can then clone other Ginseng Gumbies at his new lab in Japan- and we can sell Ginseng Gumbies to everyone for very stupid, stupid, stupidly high prices around asia.</p>
<p>mwa ha. i wonder how many blockheads have bought Ginseng Gumbies over the years. get it? “Blockheads”? </p>
<p>they’re from the show too. Gumbys enemies. see, they would make a tea of Ginseng Gumby because they hate him.</p>
<p>thiss snake tonic tasssstesss weird.</p>
<p>im going away now.</p> By lani 04 Feb 2002
i am entirely lacking the ability to come up with a neat and catchy subject heading. hence, the first thing to come to my mind…“monday” no less monday morning.
<p>i spent most of the weekend in richmond. i went to an art party to super8 (and succeed this time) her performance sculpture. went ok, but i lost the 3 eyed 4 armed vacuum strapped yellow alien toy that i stole from chris which he found in a park. it even had a red <span class="caps">LED</span>. (sob) i am immensely sad about this. (sniffle) i used to make alien buzzing sounds for it and it would light up when i pushed its vacuum pack button. and then i just lost it. i should have never taken it to a party!…that’s it, i don’t think i should have children. i’d probably just make buzzing alien sounds at them, attach <span class="caps">LED</span>s to their heads, and then lose them after a bottle of $3 red in a big warehouse…left helpless to make their own buzzing sounds and push their own <span class="caps">LED</span> buttons. why <span class="caps">GOD</span>?! why?!</p>
<p>(sigh) </p>
<p>ah well, shoot me up with depo and call me mommy dearest.</p> By jerfunfin 03 Feb 2002
After watching the new NIN live DVD and then The Third Man with Orson Wells and Joseph Cotten,
I went to the Underground with Anders. The place has changed dramatically from a year ago. It used
to be a jazz/coffee bar type of place. Now it is quite the lounge, including multi-colored lighting
(yes, they have black lights), Lava lamps, retro wall coverings, pool table and a back room for
live performances. I liked it alot. And being is it is only a block away….
<p>That wont stop my village going at all. I will just be going Underground when I am hanging in my hood<br />instead of The Abbey or Dive.</p>
<p>And I still need to find out what happened to <span class="caps">WHAT</span>!</p> By jp 02 Feb 2002
so… it seems the NSF has somehow signed on to send yours truly to japan for 8 weeks this summer. room, board, airfare, and stipend. the program basically lands me in a japanese research lab for the duration of my stay, more or less hanging out and doing science, giant robot-style. I’ll hopefully be working in the Kanaya lab, which does extremophilic bacterial bioengineering. neat.
<p>so, I should be at Osaka University, which I’m kinda psyched about (cause I’ve spend enough time around Tokyo). things I’m not psyched about include the heat, and the fact that I’ve gotta publish a paper or so and write/defend my masters before I leave. </p>
<p>it’s not 110% final – they need to nail down all the logistics with Osaka U. but, I’ve been accepted on this side of the pacific, and they’ve got a bunch of dollars lined up to spend on me. </p>
<p>so keep payin’ those taxes – that’s my mochi fund!</p> By anders pearson 30 Jan 2002
if nothing else, i’ve been going to lots of good lectures lately. i just got back by a talk that Miguel De Icaza gave at columbia.
Miguel is the founder of the GNOME foundation, founder of ximian, author of Gnumeric, and, most recently, founder and lead developer of the mono project which aims to create an open-source implementation of microsoft’s .NET architecture.
mono was the focus of miguel’s talk since that’s what he’s been doing for the last few months. microsoft has done a really poor job of explaining in non-marketing hype terms exactly what .NET is, so i was quite pleased when miguel explained it in a fairly straightforward manner. .NET is basically an application framework that aims to be an improvement on the existing windows COM object model. it’s got a bunch of new features, aims to be platform independent, network aware, and does your dishes for you too but all that is less important. what’s important, at least from miguel (and GNOME’s) point of view, is that it lets you reuse software components between programs and communicate between programs easily. .NET is composed of a virtual machine (similar to java’s), an object oriented, platform independent programming language (C#, which is almost like java), a large standard class library (kind of like java’s), an intermediate bytecode language (CIL, which is kind of like java bytecode), a just in time (JIT) compiler, an interpreter and a set of developer tools. basically, microsoft spent a lot of time studying java’s strengths and weaknesses and then took as many of the good ideas from java as they could and came up with improvements for the bad parts and made a framework out of it. since microsoft has a history of similar “innovation”, this isn’t much of a surprise. however, in this case, it looks like they did a pretty good job with the design at least.
the talk was wonderfully technical. he went into great detail on the C# compiler and JIT compiler that he and 4 other full-time developers plus about 40 part-time contributors have written in the last 6 months or so. issues like compiler optimizations, garbage collection, thread handling and IO libraries were fully discussed.
the highlight of the talk was when someone in the audience asked how such a small group of people managed to implement a working compiler, JIT, and about 900 of the 3500 classes in the library on 3 different platforms in just a couple months when it took Sun many years with many more programmers to do the same for java and microsoft has already spent a few years doing the same work with their army of programmers. miguel’s modest response: “because, we’re Coding Gods.”
By anders pearson 30 Jan 2002
last night, Guido van Rossum, the creator of the python scripting language, came to talk to the new york perlmongers.
<p>since python and perl are so similar, there’s a lot of bad blood between the fans of the two languages (programmers are weird. the more miniscule a detail is, the more rabidly they’ll argue over it). surprisingly though, everyone was quite civil.</p>
<p>Guido gave a quick introduction to python and then just answered questions for a couple hours. he spent a lot of time explaining the reasoning behind python’s approach to programming. he was very diplomatic about it, acknowledging a few areas where perl was more developed than python and very delicately pointing out areas where python had advantages. </p>
<p>since python and perl have so many things in common, it’s hard to pin down many areas where one or the other has a clear advantage. pretty much anything that you can do quickly and easily in perl, you can do quickly and easily in python, and vice versa so it comes down to which one you are more familiar with. one thing that i learned python is good for is as a wrapper for C/C++ libraries. perl has facilities for this but they are notoriously ugly and difficult. python apparently does it fairly painlessly. </p>
<p>there was also a lot of talk about python’s internals: its object model, capabilities for introspection/reflection, its security model, and its nice exception architecture (one of the things that i really missed in perl when i moved from java). since <a href="http://www.yetanother.org/dan/">dan</a> was there again, there was also a lot of talk about parrot, the bytecode language and vm that’s intended to bridge perl and python (and maybe java too).</p>
<p>all in all, i doubt i’ll give up perl anytime soon but Guido has piqued my curiousity enough that i’d like to at least become mildly competent with python. if nothing else, it looks like an excellent teaching language.</p> By sarah 30 Jan 2002
I don’t think many read my blog. I am more happy iwth this poem than anything else I’ve written in the past year. It was a total epiphany that fell off my fingers while listening to robert fripp and david sylvian play ‘exposure. It still makes me smile.
Blue broken veins of my lover's ore become nuggets of memory on my finger and at my throat. They still beat as they reflect the light in constellations of past pleasures perfect. And recollection's slow reconstructing of every failure and angry word into moments of crystalline joy breaks my heart into shards of regret.